OPERAS (ONE) MORE WILL COME LATER

OPERAS (ONE) MORE WILLCOME LATER I have collected here all readable review of operas I could find in my files; so far. I have a lot more on the workbench and more will come eventually. You will find some concepts that are slowly being built in these reviews that are not classified in any chronological or alphabetical order. They are in a way some raw matter for those who are patient( and want to find some information on this or that opera, or for those who are more curious and want to find information on this or that composer, or even for those who are more systematic and want to find some leading thread in that reading of so many operas in such a short period of time, abour six years from January 2006 to March 2012. Curiosity kills the cat they. But curiosity is so useful at times and without it we would not even know the name of our neighbors. So have a good hike in the reviews. By THE WAY SOME ARE IN French? Some are in English and some are bilingual. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. ENNO POPPE – INTERZONE : LEADER UND BILDER – LIVE PERFORMANCE,CITÉ DE LA MUSIQUE, PARIS, DECEMBER 3, 2009 JOHANN STRAUSS – DIE FLEDERMAUS JAN WILLEM DE VRIEND – EVA BUCHMANN – HANDEL – AGRIPPINA ILDEBRANDO PIZZETTI – ASSASSINIO NELLA CATTEDRALE PAUL MCCREESH – GABRIELI CONSORT – JEPHTE – JUDICIUM SALOMONIS – JONAS SERGEY EISENSTEIN – SERGEY PROKOFIEV – IVAN THE TERRIBLE JANACEK – BOULEZ – CHEREAU – FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD HANDEL – NIKOLAUS HARNONCOURT – JEPHTHA HANDEL - JEPHTHA HANDEL – ISAREL IN EGYPT DELLER CONSORT – PURCELL – KING ARTHUR ALBAN BERG – LULU – PIERRE BOULEZ JEAN-CLAUDE MALGOIRE – PHIIPPE JAROUSSKY – FRIEDRICH HANDEL – AGRIPPINA GEORG FRIEDRICH HANDEL – NICHOLAS MCGEGAN – JUDAS MACCABAEUS VIVALDI – JUDITHA TRIUMPHANS MOZART LA FINTA GIARDINIERA MOZART - MITHRIDATE MENDELSSOHN – A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM MOZART – ASCANIO IN ALBA MOZART – LA FINTA SEMPLICE PIZZETTI – KARAJAN – MORD IN DER CATHEDRALE – 1998 CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI – L’INCORONARIONE DI POPPEA – GABRIEL GARRIDO HERVÉ NIQUET – HENRY PURCELLE – KING ARTHUR GABRIEL GARRIDO – MONTEVERDI – LA FAVOLA D’ORFEO GEORG FRIEDRICH HANDEL – ARNOLD OSTMAN – AGRIPPINA RICHARD STRAUSS – DER ROSENKAVALIER – PHILIPPE JORDAN – ANNE SCHWANEWLIMS RICHARD STRAUSS – SALOME – SIR GEORG SOLTI GIUSEPPE VERDI – RIGOLETTO STORY RACHMANINOV – ALEKO SHOSTAKOVICH – THE NOSE CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI – IL RITORNO D’ULISSE IN PATRIA – GABRIEL GARRIDO – ENSEMBLE ELYMA PHILIPPE JORDAN – DAVID MCVICAR – RICHARD STRAUSS – SALOME VERDI – OTELLO – PLACIDO DOMINGO JOHN BLOW – VENUS AND ADONIS BENJAMIN BRITTEN – CURLEW RIVER BENJAMIN BRITTEN – PETER GRIMES BENJAMIN BRITTEN – PETER PEARS – BILLY BUDD 1 ENNO POPPE – INTERZONE : LEADER UND BILDER – LIVE PERFORMANCE,CITÉ DE LA MUSIQUE, PARIS, DECEMBER 3, 2009 Cette version a une dimension forte visuelle avec huit écrans sur lequel le narrateur (partiellement) et des images animées interviennent pendant la plus grande partie du concert. C’est ce tout que je vais couver, voire couvrir comme pour l’ensemencer d’une saisie signifiante. La ville, vision hiérarchisée en couches stratifiées de béton bâti. L’homme y est un spectre sépulcral fantomatique. Les images donnent à voir cette coupe transversale verticale. Le récitant, voix d’outre-tombe, taille dans le vivant fantasmagorique du visuel, la voix de la tripe. Les autres voix se font l’écho infidèle de la souffrance du non-être dans une hiérarchie plutôt débridée d’un bridage qui ne laisse passer qu’un vent fluet qui rabote les sons en une sordide sciure phonétique dans un mixer qui tourne et broie sans fin. Hell’s Kitchen, New York. La musique est un éparpillement de notes dans un ciel couvert qui ne laisse percevoir que des scintillements parfois lancinants parfois effrayants parfois dérangeants parfois torturants parfois insipides de la lassitude d’une vie dans un réseau d’impasses. Synesthétique vision torturée d’un étalement fracturé. Les sons deviennent des images et les images résonnent de sons qui viennent d’un au-delà de la gorge de la ville. Les percussions ramènent un peu d’ordre dans ce désordre mais le flux interrompu du continu sans fin se met à bafouiller à bégayer à la bouche sombre de l’autoroute dans laquelle la voiture et son chauffeur indescriptible se précipitent et se perdent. L’autoroute débouche sur un entremêlement de miettes de néons et de silhouettes cadavériques qui meurent de ne pas vivre autrement que comme des frémissements entrecroisés. Les saxos voudraient remettre un peu de suivi(e) dans ce décousu mais ils s’effilochent dans une ruelle éclairée par une fenêtre luminaire et parcourue d’une foule bigarrée. Quelques ombres, une fête foraine. La nuit brille de son obscurité contre des flashes de brillance en bannière de procession et en vasistas de voyeurs. La folie citadine avec des cauchemars de déserts exotiques ou indiens se met à tourner ses huit panneaux octogonaux recto verso comme si c’était la seconde venue rituelle de l’agneau de quelque apocalypse. Jérusalem messianique de l’Asie, de l’Inde où le bitume a cédé la place à la terre plus ou moins battue, ou la djellaba de nos banlieues cède la place au sari hindou où quelque langue indo-aryenne se graphe à des panneaux publicitaires en pendeloques à leur ligne horizontale supérieure. Ces panneaux ont le tournis du vertige scandé de quelque timbale. Mais où sont les bindi, kumkum, mangalya, tilak, sindhoor du troisième œil de la sagesse qui ouvre à l’énergie du monde des dieux ? Au noir des écrans la musique lancinante lancine et les images ressurgissent avec une grande roue folle qui tourne à l’endroit à l’envers pétrin dingue d’un effet d’optique. L’octogon des écrans s’envole et se voile et revient avec une nuit spectacle. La musique meuble le noir et accouche d’un autre défilé d’images urbaines troubles et mortes. Sonnez tambours et timbales. Le ciel va-t-il accoucher d’une bâtiment ubuesque d’architecture postcoloniale hirsute d’antennes et coiffé d’une coupole ou d’une pyramide qui explose en lumière et en grandes façades de fenêtres rectilignes de trébuchements de la caméra en zooms brouillés et saccadés. Suivez les saxos si vous le pouvez dans la croissance sans fin du nord dans le sud, de l’ouest dans l’est, de la stratification démente menterie mentholée d’un hachis de caméra qui saute d’une rebord de fenêtre à un bout de terrasse d’une poitrine en chemise à une tête en casquette. Silence. Reprise d’une basse note continue qui monte comme un nuage en couronne de fumée à un bâtiment squelettique qui sombre à la bordure inférieure de l’écran. Modulation de la note de fond dans une absence totale d’images de nuit et de vie même en mouvement. Et mes oreilles sifflent. Le récitant revient aux écrans. Une voix monte sur la basse note. Image d’un enfant perdu dans une rue vide, d’un torse nu couché à l’herbe et des flashes de silhouettes de dos, comme des bribes perdues. Un homme pousse un vélo. Le torse et sa tête s’habillent et écoutent un transistor à l’oreille. Un peu de récitant « together » avec une voix basse. Un homme de dos pousse un vélo dans une usine de brique vide abandonnée. La mort au pavé au gravat. Le contreténor est comme une voix qui 2 s’arrache à cette course à cette poubelle bleue qui roule monte d’un vent dans un arbre et d’une voie ferrée décédée. Même les arbres dans le vent ne sont pas la vie et un coureur à moitié nu n’est qu’un spectre à la Saint Marc fuyant l’arrestation et la crucifixion. Quelques colonnes soutiennent le vide. Une image d’espace herbeux. Une cour qui pourrait être de lycée. Une note lancinante nous raye les oreilles et nous écorchent les paupières d’écrans vides de nuit et pleins de blanc sans fond. Un écho aigu reprend la note basse qui se tait. Le récitant décrit ce qui reste quand tout est parti. Une espèce de radeau urbain de quelque méduse dans un océan. Un groupuscule de morceaux humains sur du pavé et dans un océan de cartes qui ne jouent même pas. Un insecte dans des végétations de plastique rose et rouge nous entraîne dans un vacillement menant à encore plus de flou et de fuite florale si ce sont des fleurs que le synthétiseur efface. Revoilà les sous-sols hésitants. Mappemonde de métal en squelette de barres tordues portant des continents qui nous engouffrent dans le noir. « Search if you want. Searching in vain. » L’ombre nous emporte. Grésillement de grillon enroué qui s’éraille en plein silence en un silence qui ne se voit pas et se cache à un son qui ne se perçoit qu’à peine comme les oreilles qui vous sifflent un soir d’hiver. Le frimas de ce vide quasi-total de nos oreilles laissées en friche et en jachère d’une fin qui n’en finit pas de ne pas finir. Rallumage des rampes. Les basses ressortent. La profondeur gronde. La lumière revient à l’octogon des écrans. Un psalmodiage en fuite. Retour au-delà de l’éraillé d’au-delà du déraillement. Cette renaissance est comme la seconde venue des Hell’s Angels qui se cachaient bien derrière l’octogon de l’apocalypse. Chœur de voix en forme de cactus à la sécheresse de ce monde qui s’auto-arrose de ses propres jérémiades. Le monde serait-il tombé dans le narcissisme paranoïaque de l’admiration de son propre déchiquètement du temps et des continents ? Comme la bête suit le dragon, la deuxième partie suit la première, plus centrée sur des silhouettes et des figures humaines. Des bribes d’harmonie essaient de nous faire croire que l’après est mieux que l’avant. Mais il n’y a que la mort dans un « fucking hospital » qui nous menace qui nous promet une route nouvelle celle au-delà de la porte qui n’a pas de lumière. « Drive a knife in my liver in a louche bistrot » Déchainement de la marginalité intérieure qui hurle dans les bas-fonds de la volonté d’en finir qui mendie une fin qu’il n’a pas le courage de faire venir d’activer et qu’il impose à son entourage. Paranoïa anti-hospitalière du mourant. Y a-t-il un choix entre le souf(f)re de l’hôpital et le sulfure de la rouge ruelle ? L’horreur de ce monde est que la fin la mort ne vient jamais dure des âges infinis. L’octogon s’enflamme mais il ne mène à rien sinon à un piétinement infernal rotatif sur son propre axe ombilical. La musique est un déferlement de flammes et de fouets qui nous mettent les chairs à vif et les nerfs à nu. La rétine de nos tympans se raye et explose peu à peu de rien du tout pas à pas de fourmi lente. Le récitant parle son silence sa mort aux écrans. Read my lips. Baiser de mort. Fin ultime de l’inexistant. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU JOHANN STRAUSS – DIE FLEDERMAUS An operetta is nothing serious since it is supposed to be in no way dramatic, not to mention tragic. That’s the main difference with the Opera. Here we are to find pleasure, entertainment, distraction in all the possible meanings of the word. That entertainment is supposed to pull us out of reality and make us live in a funny world that looks like ours but is not. One of the best German composer along that line remains Johann Strauss who is going to intertwine on a bunch of Viennese waltzes the superficial drinking and flirting festivities, carnivals or late night celebrations in the most authentic Parisian style since all that is gay has to come from Paris. And in this Bat operetta the main import from Paris is champagne and of course that hard though fluid drug gets to the heads of those rather weak Viennese bourgeois and aristocratic do-nothing no-good just rich people. They just drink, dance, wear masks and flirt most of, the time innocently. And they sing and the singing is quite different of course from the opera. Though the singers are opera singers they have to pronounce the language they sing as if it were simple language, as if they were street singers or something of that type, and a good share of the operetta is dialog, ant this present recording of it is very free with the dialogs, cutting some sections I mean. They are more singing actors than opera singers, in a way they are the ancestors of the musicals that were to become the hallmark of America and Broadway. One of these French inventions that found its supporters and composers in Vienna at once since operettas are for totally clear, untroubled people who do not know what the word “difficult” may mean to 3 millions of other people, people of another species I guess. And in these operettas, Viennese style, there is always an episode of prison, but nothing bleak and dire like in Lulu or Faust, but an episode of fun and glory that these insouciant people will tell to their friends and great grandchildren as a small experience of fame and glory, something they can pin up and advertise on the walls of their salons just over the majestic mantelpiece in a golden frame. And of course the songs are nothing difficult either. They are simple songs, supposedly very melodious that will just rock us into total pleasure and enjoyment, and for some into some coma-like ecstatic admiration and contemplation. With these operettas you understand perfectly well what Pascal Dusapin may mean when he says that with operatic singing the whole body of the listener becomes his ear. Yes that kind of music, that kind of singing is captured by our whole body. It makes every single fibre of ours spring and shiver with pleasure. Here the pleasure of soused pleasure seekers. In an opera the pleasure is that of poignantly heartbrokenly and mind-rakingly tragic heroes who will die at the end for the story to be complete. Be sure that here no dying is planned and the bat is nothing but a nickname for some night-dwelling reveller and noting else, certainly not a blood-dinking mammal. And Johannes Strauss does such a good job at that type of music that we could be transported to the moon or mars and we would not even realize it as long the music would be playing. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU. JAN WILLEM DE VRIEND – EVA BUCHMANN – HANDEL – AGRIPPINA This production of Agrippina is brilliant though it must be discussed on some details, which are no details actually, as we are going to see. The music is definitely at its best. It is Handel in its flexibility, mobility, vivacity and diversity. Each instrument has its own soul and the souls can join, they don’t get drowned in some mushy soup of homogenizing unity. What’s more the conductor is very careful to make the instruments play with the voices in such a creative way that at times we have real duets and even echoing duets from one voice to one instrument. That game is even brought to the absolute acme when Narciso in his last aria goes down into the pit, sits at the harpsichord and accompany himself on it. That’s brilliant, especially since the alto voice of the singer is a perfect echo of the pinched slightly bitter notes of the harpsichord. If the music captured the perfection of Handel’s baroque spirit and mind, the acting is also very good. The singers are never abandoned to their own singing. They are always doing something and that something has a meaning. Lesbo is the one who moves the furniture around in a set that is a big scaffolding construction in front of what could be the entrance of a palace. The scaffolding has several levels and at each level there are platforms with beds or sofas. This set is a very good idea since that gives verticality to an opera that otherwise might have been too flat, too horizontal. That also gives the possibility to have some actors at all levels and the lights then designate the one who is concerned by the scene, and the others can move in the shade of the rest of the stage As for action, dressing and undressing is quite common all along, with Nerone at the beginning and then Claudio several times with Poppea, and Ottone with Poppea in this turn in an explicit scene that will just get rid of the direct benediction by Claudio at the end. They also have some kind of banquet when Claudio accuses Ottone of treachery and the banquet starts with a toast from Claudio to turn sour right afterwards with the accusation and the rejection of Ottone by everyone. The final scene, when Claudio finally yields to Agrippina after teasing her a last time with Ottone on the throne, he is playing dice or some game with Pallante and Narciso and sharing the money of the innings. But though they have given Narciso’s part back to a male alto, they did not go as far as going back to the original score. Nerone as a tenor appears as an older young man who is infatuated with his mother to the point of some incestuous attachment if not relation amounting to intercourse. He sounds and looks like a pervert and not what he is supposed to be a voracious, covetous, gluttonous, rapacious teenager just after puberty. Then the going back to his mummy to complain about Poppea who pushed him away is absurd and Agrippina’s thrashing and chastising is impossible since the man is a man and not a child. At this moment he deserves a good spanking but he does not have the age and the voice any longer that would justify it. Then his conversion to power and his rejection of Poppea and love is artificial and superficial. That conversion should make him vicious for future times and it does not because of that voice and age. 4 In the same way Ottone should be a male alto, in Handel’s tradition, because he is the military hero, but also in Handel’s artistic vision, because he is also a younger man who is awkward and shy with women and who is timid with the emperor. Then his suffering after being rejected as a traitor makes him with his baritone voice and his young physique look like some kind of romantic Werther whereas he should look like a baroque hero suffering and enjoying his suffering, lamenting and enjoying even relishing in his lamenting. From baroque exquisite suffering to romantic wailing and whining, there is some kind of a treacherous deviation. And the last scene of undressing and love with Poppea then looks artificial. In many ways Ottone is one of these young courtiers who are trying to capture the beautiful young lady over there and who has to suffer to deserve her, though at times that young courtier might yield to the flattery of the king or duke or whoever who suggests power for him, in exchange of the beautiful eyes of the girl he has seduced. That is definitely baroque and not romantic. But then the show itself is so beautiful that we let that treacherous twist go and enjoy the rest, including the romantic rewriting and its contradictions. On the other hand the DVD is of course filmed. It remains an opera and the mental reflective distance necessary for proper reception is always present and we will regret a lot the fact that there are no Italian subtitles, which forces us either to follow on a printed libretto or to know or guess the text. This is awkward and definitely a shortcoming, and a very long shortcoming. The shooting is quite volatile and flexible and that is good. The images are not inert and immobile, far from it. The angles are varied and the cameras are multiple. Fine. There are many close-ups and even very close close-ups and that is good to capture the expression of the faces and the feelings of the characters. Details are essential, though in the real theatre they evade you except if you have binoculars. Full stage pictures are quite systematically used to give a large picture of what is happening, especially since the stage is used vertically as well as horizontally and there are some extensions in or over the pit. In the famous scene between Poppea and Claudio with Ottone and Nerone hidden away, this production puts Ottone under the bed, which is very Hollywoodian, and Nerone in the pit, which is very expressive of the nuisance he is being to Poppea at this moment: in the pit with snakes of course. The camera at the end gives a frontal image of Agrippina up at the top of the scaffolding and Nerone down on the stage sitting on the throne. This is symbolical and it needs to be given as a full picture and then the image moves from the top to the bottom and back to the top and then the full picture. This means a lot about the relation between Agrippina and Nerone. Unluckily it cannot reinforce the fact that when Nerone was thrashed by his mother he should have become a vicious angry young man who was probably already concocting in his mind the assassination of this domineering mother, since the scene leads us to contemplating a perverse rather young man who is infatuated with his mother to some kid of incestuous attachment. In the ending of this production he appears too much infatuated with his mother and drowning in his enjoyment of the throne. He is a satiated young man not the vicious per vers mind we know he is going to become, and one can only become what one is already potentially. The last thing I would like to say is that this production uses cutting shifts from one angle to another, from one camera to another and from one distance to another too much. This production does not use zooming in and out enough and when it uses a zooming in movement it is maybe too slow, and there is no zooming out afterwards. What’s more travelling does not seem to be an action the camera or cameras know how to do on this stage. And that’s somewhat displeasing at times. The constant jumping from one short sequence from a particular angle, distance or camera to another short sequence from a different angle, distance and camera, and by short I mean at times very, very short, is not the best for an opera like this one. It is a typical TV or cinema technique, but here we are filming an opera for a DVD. The reception is neither that of a film in a movie theatre nor that of a TV show or series on a small screen in a drawing room. That use of cameras, angles and distances gives dynamism to the image and the film, but it slices the opera up too much. An opera needs some continuity in the filming of a scene or an aria, at least some stability of vision, and zooming in and out and traveling is a lot better provided it is neither too fast nor too slow. A very good production that might have been difficult to watch in the opera house itself but it is rendered very well on the DVD in spite of some artistic choices at the level of voices and filming that maybe are drawbacks. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU ILDEBRANDO PIZZETTI – ASSASSINIO NELLA CATTEDRALE 5 The opening is typical of the end of the 1950s. Soft and somber to fit the drama and at the same time some minor chords and intervals giving some unbalance to the music to introduce the struggle that looms high all along this opera. Bells are ringing the change from the introduction to the first choir of women who want to be representative of the people, the faithful of Canterbury. The priests enter with some percussions and start singing their vision of the world full of struggling and fighting. The returning women explode and sound like criers, lamenters, like some kind of tempest, a blowing and raging wind of the mind against this cruel masculine world. It is this constant contrasting of men and women, of male and female voices, of the church versus the faithful, of politicians versus the people, that is worked upon with great subtlety, and the absolutely never ending music, one track merging into the next as if it was a river in which here and there an instrument or a voice stands out in a fearful and frightening way. Thomas Becket then appears as firm and never touched by doubt in this brutal confrontation of mind and body, spirit and power. He does not doubt in his solid and strong voice that does not get into excessive movements. Peaceful and pacified he is like someone who knows what is coming and does not try to escape it because he is right and has to stand firm in front of coming adversities. The voice of Thomas itself is full and well balanced in some low vocal stratum that sounds like the best founding conviction for the Archbishop and for all of us. Let’s be convinced of our righteousness. Then the first tempter arrives singing like a clown in a circus or a street artist. Thomas just listens and answers peacefully and pushes the temptation of easy pleasures away. The second tempter is a lot more dramatic and violent with a darker voice coming up from deep under, the world of politics, the real tempter, and the temptation is harder to reject with no and yes plying from one to the other. The women can then come up and express an oppressive feeling in front of the ensuing silence, which reinforces What Thomas has to say before the third tempter arrives speaking in the name of the people, against the king, for a union of Barons and Church, a rebellion against this despotic king. Thomas can easily parry this off: the church stands all by itself for its own right. The fourth tempter has it easy to encourage Thomas in his vanity, his pride, the pride to become a martyr if possible. The women are then back to help Thomas in his rejection of the four tempters. Thomas has found perfect equilibrium and force in this battle, in this purification that ends on a vision of a sword against which Thomas asks his guardian angel to protect him. A very Christian moment that closes this first act. The Intermezzo is Thomas Becket’s sermon for Christmas, his last Christmas. The singing expresses trust and confidence in God and the future, while the music behind seems to evoke some immense flowing, that of the river of life or the ocean of Edenlike eternity, the wind of the divine cosmos. And this vision of certitude shifts to that of the martyrdom that is coming, the Passion after the Nativity in one wink of an eye, with this time some dark and somber strings playing deep under and behind a musical surface that becomes rather discordant. The opening solo of the leader of the women’s choir has the color of submission to fate, of transcendence in submitting to what has to come. The priests and their choir come and set the stage for the murder with references to saints and liturgy. The Knights arrive on some kind of trumpet light music and the vocal and musical fight can start, a tragic argument that sounds like a perfectly built symphony of voices. The choir of women comes in at that moment to suspend the tension and maybe makes it more human, fills it up with feelings and sentiment. The Archbishop can come back for his final words, his liberation, his freeing from this world of alienation with his priests and monks, a sermon that is evoked in music with a long sustained note on a violin as if the world were holding its breath before the descent of death first brought up by the Requiem in Latin of course and the Dies Irae sung by the priests, the monks, a group of boys and the women is both traditional but also very powerful: it sounds as if an immense crowd was singing the lamentation it pushes up to the sky. And the Archbishop himself can come back and preach his own sainthood the necessity to go to the end of a road you have entered knowing where it was leading. The knights can also come pursuing him on the stage, in the cathedral, killing him and then turning to the audience and trying to convince us they did the right good thing that was unavoidable, hence necessary, that their mission was divine too. It was their mission to execute a man they recognize and declare great. Then the opera can end with a religious choir that sanctifies Thomas Becket. The book can close, the story is finished, the audience can clap, the music has come to its end and it will forever remain divine and will resurrect any time a conductor takes the magic wand of his art in hand. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU 6 PAUL MCCREESH – GABRIELI CONSORT – JEPHTE – JUDICIUM SALOMONIS – JONAS The first oratorio, Jephte, is a tour de force. Jephthah goes to war against the Ammonites and vows to God he will sacrifice the first person who will come out of his home to greet him after the battle if he is victorious. We can note Israel, and the Bible, is still in the old mood in that episode since a human sacrifice was normal, no matter who it was, wife, son, daughter, servant, or whoever first came out. It is amazing because I would have said the Bible had stepped over that kind of barbaric practice after Abraham had failed to sacrifice his own son on the intervention of God himself. Old habits die hard, I guess. In this case the first person is the daughter. Then the story is bleak. She asks for the freedom to go in the mountain for a fortnight to lament on her virginity with her friends. But that bleak ending is transformed by the music, transfigured by Carissimi into a dirge that is so powerful, so poignant that it becomes an accusation against Israel and even Israel’s God to allow such public joy about the victory, such adulation for the victorious hero and at the same time such a barbaric practice. We have to think too that the most famous Virgin in Italy can only be the Holy Virgin, and that becomes an accusation against the Jews about such non respect of virginity that deserves to be celebrated and not assassinated. That is only achieved with the music that turns the celebration of a victory and victorious hero into a funeral and long lamentation about the waste this sacrifice represents. The second oratorio is quite different in tone since it is the famous judgment of Solomon confronted to two women who pretend to be the mother of one child and Solomon, who did not have DNA tests behind his wisdom, dramatizes the situation by ordering the child to be divided in two and one half to be given to each woman. That enables the real mother to reveal herself by accepting to abandon the child rather than having him divided, hence killed. Solomon of course vindicates that revealed mother and gives her the child. And the conclusion is so Christian since the child is declared loved by three people, a thrice-loved child as the translation said, an echo of the Christian trinity but also of the triple divinity of many religions generally considered as pagan, though the pagan reference to the triple Goddess, the thrice crowned Goddess of Shakespeare (Diana, Selene, Hecate) is transformed, de-paganized by one of the three people being a man, a king and one woman a liar, out of love of course, but a liar all the same. The conclusion is of course a song of joy and unity. The third oratorio, Jonas, is about another very famous character from the Bible, Jonah. The tempest on the sea is a vocal marvel. All voices are used to create the atmosphere and the violence we need to feel the drama. Jonah is calmly sleeping below deck and the captain asks him to join the sailors and pray his God to pacify the tempest. The sailors cast dice and Jonah is designated as the one who must explain the reason of the tempest. When he says he is a Jew, they change tones and wonder what they can do to him to pacify the tempest, hence how they can sacrifice him to quench the thirst of their Gods. Jonah encourages them by declaring himself responsible for this storm. Thrown into the sea he asks God to have him swallowed by a whale and then to be cast into eternity because he will obey any order from God. This long prayer or incantation to God is serene though sad, fully satiated in his love for God though resigned to any punishment or violence. God then orders the whale to spit Jonah out and Jonah to go preach his faith in Nineveh who accepts to be converted to Judaism because of the miracle. This third oratorio is maybe less dramatic than the others but it is also about a God that is erratic in many ways, choleric even, and who selects an scapegoat to counterbalance and satisfy his dissatisfaction against men who do not serve him the way he wants. A cruel God in many ways, the God of the Jews. I would say such tales are anti-Semite, but then the Bible of the Jews is anti-Semite. Paul McCreesh plays that music with such daintiness and delicacy that we are charmed by the singing, the notes, the melodious force of the notes. That definitely erases most of the questionable ideological message. The music is too nice, too poignant, too humane to be anti-anything. It is the voice of the human soul when it is suffering some human fateful event, nothing more. Too human to be divine. We are everyday confronted to impossible choices: betray a friend or parent, reject the demand of anyone anywhere close, or be swallowed by the enormity of the social whale, not to speak of the giant historical whale that just crunch our bones between its iron teeth. Paul McCreesh is the softener of this destiny. Note we would have liked to have the original words and not only an English translation. 7 Dr Jacques COULARDEAU SERGEY EISENSTEIN – SERGEY PROKOFIEV – IVAN THE TERRIBLE This double film is a masterpiece in many ways. It took two years of research before starting to come out of thin air and being filmed. The first part came out in 1944 and the second part in 1945. This means the research was done when the USSR was down under the feet of the nazis. The first part came out when the tide had turned and the Russians were already advancing in Poland. The second part came out after the fall of Berlin or close before. The political meaning at the time was clear. The first part was singing the praise of the man who unified Russia, just like it was necessary in the war years to reunify the USSR for the last push to Berlin. The second part is slightly different since it was the time when Ivan the Terrible had to face the plots and conspiracy from the Boyars, the nobles and the top echelon church people and he had to defeat them with wise schemes more than just plain violence. That was of course essential after the war to face the various groups of people who could have spoken out of unity now the outside danger was eliminated. But we have to go beyond this immediate and historical value of the film when it was shot. It is a masterpiece because Eisenstein uses rather simple means to produce an epic film whose every scene is poignant, powerful, impressive, etc. Eisenstein uses all the possibilities his know-how and experience provide him with. Of course he uses black and white to play on shade, shadows and contrast so that some scenes are frightening and quite in the line of the big masters of horror of the late 20s, Fritz Lang or Murnau. He uses the body language and the composition of the scenes and setting to make every single square centimeter meaningful and active. The hands, the faces, the bodies are among the best actors of the film along with the actors themselves, quite in the line of what Eisenstein was doing in the 20s, but even better because he was able to use their lips in order to make them speak. The soundtrack is prodigious. He composes a real symphony with voices used in the most dramatic and expressive way, with all kinds of sounds and noise that give a real depth to the pictures on the screen and the voices of the actors, and finally the outstanding music score by Prokofiev: probably one of the best film music ever and that music totally avoids the repetitiveness of the music of the old silent films to create a fully developed universe of its own that amplifies the voices and the sounds and noises. That creates the epic atmosphere the story itself needs. What’s more, in the second part, the use of color for two reels of the film shows the force of the black and white reels, and at the same time shows how Eisenstein can use the color of these reels in order to create a different but similar contrast, this time centered on red dominating the various other colors that are essentially, white, black and yellow. The red of these reels becomes the expression of life and at the same time of some oppressiveness coming from some danger that red also designates (and surprisingly enough we cannot find any “revolutionary” meaning to that red, but we may be missing some inside meaning in the USSR of the time). The films have been digitally re-mastered but not in any way changed: we still have the jerky pictures of those days and the blurry sound track of before digital sound (even the music that could have been rerecorded). And it is good because we really have the impression to watch an old film from the 50s. By the way do not believe what the historical presentation of the bonuses tell you, in English, at least in my edition, because it is purely there to pacify those who may see Stalin behind Ivan. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU JANACEK – BOULEZ – CHEREAU – FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD The subject is in itself a tremendous provocation since it is an adaptation of a novel by Dostoyevsky but one or two centuries later, which means in a context of post soviet Gulag deportation that continued the Czar’s tyranny. Some Wagnerian accents in the overture are telling us exactly where we are. In a prison camp with high concrete walls and no sight of the sky or whatever fresh from outside. The opening scene is the distribution of water to the thirsty prisoners. The wardens are just plain violent, dressed in some drab green 8 whereas the prisoners are in grey and brown. It is a demonstration of violence from the wardens and of grunting obedience from the prisoners. This scene then moves to the standard fight among prisoners with insults and derogatory terms, and yet the violence is contained if not regulated by some when they announce the arrival of a nobleman. When brought in this one is at once undressed “A prisoner owns nothing!” He has his head shaved. He declares himself a political prisoner. His glasses are discarded but recuperated by a younger prisoner. And the punishment is immediate: one hundred lashes. One older prisoner has something in a blanket. They chase him for it and discover it is an articulated Czarist eagle. They play with it trying to make it fly away since a bird can, but the game is short lived because they are sent back to work while the half naked nobleman is taken to be whipped. We jump to after work when they come out of the showers naked or nearly naked and dressing on stage. One starts telling his past. It is incoherent. It is a sign of the mental alienation they run into in such an environment. Violence then is some psychotic evasion from their locked-up fate. Another of the older ones starts telling how he got here after killing the major of his company who was a real tyrant with the men. It is hardly coherent again. He considers he is justly punished though what he did was perfectly justified. He is sewing during that time and the younger prisoner is providing him the thread he needs. He tells he was beaten up and then the nobleman is brought back after his whipping, all covered in blood with manacles and shackles, practically blind since he has lost his glasses and trying to move around by feeling the wall with his hands. Then the younger prisoner gives him his glasses back. He finally sees where he is and hides in some recess. The first act ends with the falling of an enormous pile of ripped up books and notebooks on the stage. In the second act the prisoners pick the mess with baskets, sacks and crates. The younger prisoner, Alyeya, and the nobleman are teaming together. Alyeya is telling about his sister and mother. He feels guilty about the grief he has caused to the latter. The nobleman suggests he teaches Alyeya to read and write. It is quitting time. The rest of the day is free, three women arrive with big bags and a stage play is announced. A pope comes in to bless the day in the presence of the prison officials and their wives. It is the occasion of more past telling. The incoherent one who had started the telling in the first act is coming back with how he killed, out of love, the brother of a certain Luisa he had fallen in love with. The music becomes very romantic during that tale while the actor is turning it into a grotesque undressing and re-dressing episode. He confesses how he killed the brother. The music turns into a chase and the play is going to start. They all get on the bleachers. The play is the Kedril play. A man lives his last day on earth and is chased by devils. It is the occasion for some orgiastic action on the stage between male prisoners and others playing the women. And then the pantomime of the fair miller’s wife is announced. With more frolicking between one man playing the miller’s wife and many others playing her husband and her lovers, till the miller is damned and taken away by devils. An argument develops against the nobleman who has tea, which means he can pay for it. One angry man menaces him. Alyeya comes in between and his wounded. The culprit is taken away with rolling drums that seem to mean he is going to be executed on the spot. The third act is in the dormitory. The prisoners all get kind of crazy, telling bits of stories, ranting and raving, with some violence and the attempt to put everyone to sleep. Two seem to stand apart, Alyeya and the nobleman who has taught him how to write and read, which is some difference here. Time for one more story. A man, Filka, employed by a rich farmer decides to take his pay, go away and refuse the farmer’s daughter telling him he has had her for one year. The farmer becomes furious and the girl is beaten up. She is hastily married to the story-teller. She was a virgin. He goes after Filka who laughs at him and tells him he got married because he was drunk. He goes back to his in-laws accusing them. Then he beats his wife. Filka joins the army. Before leaving he apologizes to the girl and she forgives him. She then acknowledges her love for Filka and her husband takes her to the woods and kills her. At this very moment one prisoner calls for the guard: one man is dead who is discovered to be Filka. At this moment the nobleman is called by the wardens. The governor of the prison comes to apologize to the nobleman, make peace with him and announce he is free. Before leaving we have a short sad scene between the nobleman and Alyeya who considers the nobleman as his father. The eagle comes back and manages to fly away by magic. It brings some kind of dream of sweet liberty, but the prison never changes. The wardens send the prisoners back to work, throwing the nobleman 9 out and the scene closes on one crazy prisoner dancing half naked on a bed and Alyeya torn up by pain violently wiggling on the ground. There is little and a lot to say. The story is absolute pessimism about no future in this world that is nothing but a prison from which you may escape in your dreams for five minutes at night. The music is a marvelous accompaniment, so part of the story and storytelling that you don’t even capture it separately. The stage direction is absolutely drab and squalid like the story and the music. We are in front of a masterpiece of the post-post-modern era: there is no future, there is no hope. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU HANDEL – NIKOLAUS HARNONCOURT – JEPHTHA This is a Biblical oratorio that refers to a very sorry episode of the Old Testament. In just a few words, Jephtha goes to war in the name of Israel to liberate some area. He vows before leaving that he will put to death the first person who salutes him if he comes back triumphant. He so vows to put to death a member of his own community to thank his god for his victory, not an enemy like in Titus Andronicus. A member of his own community. Barbaric. And triumphant he is and his own daughter salutes him first. The plot sickens. But God in his great omnipotence saves the life of the daughter provided she dedicates her whole life and virginity to God himself, killing all possible love, particularly with her promised husband Hamor. He is a god of justice, maybe, of authority for sure, of obedience definitely, but of love certainly not. But Handel transforms this hateful story into a marvellous opera thanks to his music and the singing. I defy you to find any distance between n him and the plot that he takes the way it comes without hinting anything negative about that god. So let’s speak of the music. The voices first. The mother Storgé is a mezzo-soprano and that’s the perfect choice for her role. She is a permanent lamenter. She laments when the war is announced. She laments when the daughter is promised to a sacrifice. She event laments when the daughter is saved from death though not from virginity. She is a lamenting and weeping mother and a mezzo-soprano is just the perfect range for a woman to sing that role. The alto is Hamor and not Jephtha and we understand why very fast. He is a perfect lover going to the war, wailing slightly and rejoicing with the promised fame, especially since his promised wife Iphis is exhilarated by the war and the excitement. He is also the perfect messenger who brings the news of the victory, ignorant he is of the danger that message conveys. Mercury could not have been better. He is also the perfect second grade scapegoat to pay for the dumbness of his father-in-law-to-be and who will never be. He can even rejoice in the survival of his paramour and the fact that he will become the son of her father. That’s a good payment for his life of celibacy. And he can even sound joyful when he greets his for ever virginal ex-promised wife. The fact that the father is a tenor takes him completely out of the hero position and he is not a hero, far from it. He is not even able to win a battle within the help of god. Iphis on CD 3 track 15 reaches a tip top summit in singing: she sings her joy at being saved and at being able to offer her life, instead of sacrificing it, to her god. Her song of praise and joy little by little turns into a tenebrae and she ends up singing her own requiem, the requiem she deserves since she is going to be buried alive in the temple. We could analyze every moment of each one of these voices to show how perfect they are for the plot and events. But let’s shift to the music itself. There is no surprise to have Handel’s style all along. But his style is so creative that the whole oratorio is starred and spangled with myriads of small pleasurable gems from beginning to end. Let me give you a few. Storgé on CD 1 track 5 is the perfect bird of bad omen, announcing the worst catastrophe though the war is not even started. She is able to express a level of dread and fright unimaginable and yet an absolute submissive attitude in front of that hellish situation, and she only knows about the war. Hamor on CD 2 track 1 is reporting the victorious battle as if it were some innocent game in the playground of his school. It is so naïve, so childish in tone and in terms with angels fluttering over the battle 10 field so that we can only admire the innocence of this poor man who is going to be deprived of his promised wife by the silliest vow possible from a grown man, his father-in-law-to-be. He is some kind of Mercury with the voice of Cupid, or is it Adonis before he starts being chased into dying under the tusks of a boar? The symphony on CD 2 track 8 is the perfect shift from the battle field to the city where Iphis is waiting for her father with a choir of virgins. It is just dramatic enough, maybe ironical in a way, since we know about the vow. The next symphony on CD 3 track 4 bringing the angel on the stage to commute Iphis death penalty into virginal life imprisonment is also sublimely beautiful in that situation that should make people laugh but that is dramatic in a way because god is not better than Jephtha: a man can make a mistake but he will not be punished, his daughter and her paramour will. That’s divine justice. The symphony is of course a beautiful piece to make this shift from drama one to drama two. The instruments are systematically used as if they were voices and vice versa. But I would like to note the use of the flute on CD 2 track 4 when Iphis is rejoicing after the news of the victory of her father. I would also note the harpsichord on CD 2 track 10 when Jephtha realizes the big mistake he has committed, a mistake that amounts to a crime since an innocent human being is going to be sacrificed to pay for his promise. The harpsichord is the best cuckoo bird for the furious self-satisfied and submissive anger at no one in particular except maybe a little bit himself: even old monkeys can learn new tricks after all. We have to say a few words on the language. Handel is one of the best English composers as for using the stressed nature of the language to support his music and to play the music. He is able to cut up a word just after the stressed syllable, have vocalizes on this stressed vowel and then go back a couple of words and go through. What’s more his text is extremely well written. On CD 2 tracck 7 the chorus has first a direct parallel symmetrical line and then a chiastic inverted antagonistic symmetrical line: “In glory high, in might serene, / He sees, moves all, unmov’d, unseen.” And on CD 2 again, track 12 he uses a ternary iambic parallel construction: “so fair, so chaste, so good”. When you add the music these linguistic structures become diamonds in your ears. An absolute must and we regret all the operas and oratorios by Handel are not … yet? … available. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU HANDEL - JEPHTHA The last oratorio Handel composed before getting completely blind. His own fate as illustrated from the Bible. Jephtha becomes the general of the Israelite army on the promise to become the political leader of the Israelites after his victory over the Ammonites, and on the vow that he will sacrifice to God the first person who will greet him after his victory. The beginning is somber because it starts with the famous words “It must be so!” but also because it starts with Zebul, Jephtha’s brother, a bass that makes that somberness deep and disquieting. Then Storge, Jephtha’s wife, comes with a long dirge, a lamentation against war, the war Jephtha is going to join to win “liberty, life and love”, a trinity that is more like a hope that cannot be fulfilled, that can only be longed for, lamented for and upon. Her being a mezzo soprano adds to that gloom hanging over the oratorio from the very start. And Hamor amplifies this feeling with another consonantal trinity “drives darkness and despair”. The first ray of real hope, if not joy yet, is the duet of Iphis and Hamor, the soprano and the alto, who find some communion in their expected happiness after the victory that should guarantee the freedom of Israel and their happy marriage. But Jephtha and his vow re-plunges the oratorio into dire and bleak somberness, while Storge is fearing some dreadful future. And the first act closes on this gloomy fearful atmosphere that is hardly pushed aside temporarily by Iphis and the final chorus that sings the trust the Israelites have in Jephtha and the victory that will be brought to the army by God himself. The second act is that of the victory. So it starts on a joyful tone with a long chorus of Israelites praising the victory, and an aria by Hamor singing his love and imminent satisfaction. It is all amplified by Iphis getting ready to greet her victorious father with a trinity of instrument, “a lute, a harp and a flute”. Jephtha glorifies his victory and a chorus comes to amplify that praising of that victory worked pout by God himself. And the first one to come and praise her father is Iphis, Jephtha’s daughter, with her mother and a chorus of virgins. And Iphis is the first to praise her father. There Jephtha’s vow explodes like thunder. “Open thy marble jaws, o tomb”. Jephtha descends into a lamentation that sounds like a Tenebrae. Zebul adds some darkness but the real horror explodes with Storge, Iphis’s mother. Hamor then proposes to take 11 Iphis’s place. The quartet that follows is poignant. Ebul, Storge, Hamor ask for sparing Iphis but Japhtha has to respect his vow to God. And what must be becomes in Jephtha’s words “her doom is fixed as fate”. Iphis then accepts her fate to consolidate Israel’s freedom. Her resigned dirge is beautiful with dignity. The final chorus of the second act laments on God’s decrees and that decree is “Whatever is, is right”. Absolute submission to reality because it is all God’s will and decision. At this moment Handel seems to project his own getting blind onto the whole creation. Can we consider God is that cruel and that vain? And yet Handel brings some joy-sounding music to this fateful submission that makes the final sentence so much more dreadful. The third act starts with the sacrifice and Jephtha puts his vow and the victory and peace in perspective. It is God’s decision and this has to be accepted and his tone changes to a tone of willful elation. Iphis adds a touch of humble resignation, full satisfaction in submission. The symphony cuts this atmosphere with a music of pure pleasure. And that break brings the divine intervention of the angel that we all expect and are waiting for. The divine intervention that stops the sacrifice and justifies the vow as a test on Jephtha’s faith. The angel is a soprano and the very transfiguration of Iphis. The music is clear and even crystalline contrasting against the back drop of an organ continuo. The price to pay for this divine salvation is for Iphis to remain a virgin for life. The bargain, because it is a bargain since there is a condition that could be refused, is at once accepted by Jephtha and the priests in total submission to the God of Israel. The music after the praises from Zebul and Storge, becomes really clear and joyful with the duet of Iphis and Hamor later joined by Storge, Jephtha and Zebul. Hamor resigns himself just like Iphis does; She resigns all of her Hamor-side to heaven and becomes a virgin. Hamor in the very same way resigns all his Iphis-side to heaven and accepts her to be a virgin till the end of her life. The final chorus is, by the music and the singing, a festive gay and joyful celebration of this happy ending of sorts. Handel accepts his fate but this oratorio is one of the most somber he has ever composed, and being the last we will not know what music he could have composed afterwards. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU HANDEL – ISAREL IN EGYPT It starts with a dirge that matches the mourning at the beginning of the story. Joseph is dead and Handel uses all his art to express this somber episode of the history of Israel. Chorus #3, ‘How is the mighty fall’n’ is the absolute melting into perfection of the trochaic verse, the music (notes and harmony) and the rhythm that emphasizes the trochaic beat by pouring it into the measure. The meaning is also dramatic. We find here the perfect fusion of meaning, rhythm (both musical and linguistic), harmony and dramatic rendering by the chorus. And this unity will be changed in chorus #6, with the same words but in a dirge that lengthens the unstressed syllables, that spreads out the measures, that softens the beat into a lamentation and no longer a yowl of pain. And the four voices are used to create a feeling of unity, at times a feeling of diversity, a diversity that leads to unity or springs up from unity. Fugues, canons, and all other contrastive resources are summoned by Handel to deconstruct any kind of artificial unison to reconstruct a unison that sings in the plurality of unity to represent a people and not any homogeneous mass. That use of the voices of the chorus is definitely a new way to dramatize the voices themselves that become part of the plot. But the plot is simple. The Israelis go to Egypt on an exodus of the whole people to become rich in a way, invited by Joseph. But when Joseph dies things change and the Israelis are enslaved. Moses will free them again. The second part starts with a recitative that goes back to the style of Bach’s Passions, though the first part had no recitatives. There will only be two recitatives in this part, one before chorus #14 and the other before chorus #15. This enables Handel to jump directly from the prosperous Israelis in Egypt to them being enslaved and calling for some savior from God. There comes Moses and the first plague: ‘He turned their waters into blood’. These two recitatives are thus the perfect ellipse that enables Handel to jump over centuries from one period of glory to the liberation that comes after the enslavement. That also enables the whole opera to be centered on Joseph in the first part and on Moses in the second and third parts. Handel uses another practical trick, a castrato, today a male alto, to sing the second (frogs) and third (pestilence) plagues. Handel was using castrati for his male heroes. Here the alto is not one particular character but he is the tool of liberation for the Israelis. And thus he becomes the voice of God, and the voice of Moses. 12 The chorus takes over for the flies, lice and locusts. The chorus dedicated to the hailstones is brilliantly brilliant, powerful and majestic like some court music for one great event. And the next chorus for darkness is a genial change towards a tenebrae, a death dirge. These successive choruses for various plagues show the great flexibility of Handel’s art. The violence of female voices and the cutting and bludgeoning music for the first-born is an image of pure agony for the babies and joy for the Israelis. An image of absolute power with two tempos superimposed: the deadly one, slow and strong, and in between these beats a more fluent and quick rhythm as if the first rhythm was slicing the second into tidbits of nothingness. The next chorus makes Moses take his people out. It is sweeping vast in many ways and yet a little bit hesitant till the chorus finds some unison and some direction as if the force necessary for the escape was built by Moses in the people slowly but resolutely. And the Red Sea is parted by chorus #23 that splits the first sentence between power and silence on one side and smoothness on the other, opposing the rebuking of the sea and the dry soil at the bottom. Then the chorus brings the rejoicing people across in a fast nearly frenetic march between the two halves of this rebuked Red Sea. This second part can end on a vision of the greatness of God and the wisdom of the Israelis who can see this greatness. There unison is necessary, but at once the voices become free again and they start a vocal ballet that creates, builds up the unity of the people. The third part is entirely dedicated to Moses’ song. And Handel innovates anew. He alternates the chorus with 3 duets and 3 arias of the four voices: a soprano duet, a bass duet, a tenor aria, a soprano aria, an alto and tenor duet, an alto aria and the soprano with the chorus. These arias and duets are lauding the Lord. He is Moses’ strength, salvation, he is a man of war. Then the blood-lust of the enemy and then their defeat in the breath of God. God is the liberator and redeemer of his people. The heritage of the Lord is his temple, the temple contains the heritage of God, the Tables of the Covenant. The first remark as a conclusion is that Handel succeeded perfectly well to match the natural rhythm of the language and that of the music. Then he uses the voices in such a creative way that they sound even better than the instruments in the orchestra. He twins and opposes them one against the others but also uses them to build a fugue from one voice to the next in the most marvelous way. He also uses each voice in solos, arias and duets in an astonishingly rich way. The tenor as the enemy gives an image of an extremely savage and enterprising army of Egyptian soldiers. All in that tenor aria is aiming at and achieving this powerful rendering of blood-lust. And the answer comes from the soprano in God’s drowning them all. The chorus brings us up and up to a steep abyss and a moment of suspension over the chasm. And there the duet of the tenor and the alto is a pure island of beauty. We are truly redeemed by these two voices from beyond the material world, these voices that lead us beyond our frail existence into redeemed eternity. The alto sounds angelic on the background of the tenor and the tenor sounds like the divine Christ made man on the background of his divine alto alter ego. But the fear of the people in front of God is depicted by a beating tempo, heavy thrashing of the instruments as opposed to the lamenting of the chorus that explodes then in three voices, sopranos, tenors and bases. Then comes the divine voice of the alto building the temple out of nothingness as if his words were phatic enough to erect the temple with their sheer syllables. The triumph of the Lord and a recitative can introduce Miriam, the prophetess, in her solo with the chorus. At this moment we reach perfection and th Handel is the operatic genius of the 18 century that only Mozart, in a more mundane way, could equal. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU SHORTER VERSION It starts with a dirge that matches the mourning at the beginning of the story. Joseph is dead and Handel uses all his art to express this somber episode of the history of Israel. Chorus #3, ‘How is the mighty fall’n’ is the absolute melting into perfection of the trochaic verse, the music (notes and harmony) and the rhythm that emphasizes the trochaic beat by pouring it into the measure. The meaning is also dramatic. We find here the perfect fusion of meaning, rhythm (both musical and linguistic), harmony and dramatic rendering by the chorus. And this unity will be changed in chorus #6, with the same words but in a dirge that lengthens the unstressed syllables, that spreads out the measures, that softens the beat into a lamentation and no longer a yowl of pain. And the four voices are used to create a feeling of unity, at times a 13 feeling of diversity, a diversity that leads to unity or springs up from unity. Fugues, canons, and all other contrastive resources are summoned by Handel to deconstruct any kind of artificial unison to reconstruct a unison that sings in the plurality of unity to represent a people and not any homogeneous mass. That use of the voices of the chorus is definitely a new way to dramatize the voices themselves that become part of the plot. But the plot is simple. The Israelis go to Egypt on an exodus of the whole people to become rich in a way, invited by Joseph. But when Joseph dies things change and the Israelis are enslaved. Moses will free them again. The second part starts with a recitative that goes back to the style of Bach’s Passions, though the first part had no recitatives. There will only be two recitatives in this part, one before chorus #14 and the other before chorus #15. This enables Handel to jump directly from the prosperous Israelis in Egypt to them being enslaved and calling for some savior from God. There comes Moses and the first plague: ‘He turned their waters into blood’. These two recitatives are thus the perfect ellipse that enables Handel to jump over centuries from one period of glory to the liberation that comes after the enslavement. That also enables the whole opera to be centered on Joseph in the first part and on Moses in the second and third parts. Handel uses another practical trick, a castrato, today a male alto, to sing the second (frogs) and third (pestilence) plagues. Handel was using castrati for his male heroes. Here the alto is not one particular character but he is the tool of liberation for the Israelis. And thus he becomes the voice of God, and the voice of Moses. The chorus takes over for the flies, lice and locusts. The chorus dedicated to the hailstones is brilliantly brilliant, powerful and majestic like some court music for one great event. And the next chorus for darkness is a genial change towards a tenebrae, a death dirge. These successive choruses for various plagues show the great flexibility of Handel’s art. The violence of female voices and the cutting and bludgeoning music for the first-born is an image of pure agony for the babies and joy for the Israelis. An image of absolute power with two tempos superimposed: the deadly one, slow and strong, and in between these beats a more fluent and quick rhythm as if the first rhythm was slicing the second into tidbits of nothingness. The next chorus makes Moses take his people out. It is sweeping vast in many ways and yet a little bit hesitant till the chorus finds some unison and some direction as if the force necessary for the escape was built by Moses in the people slowly but resolutely. And the Red Sea is parted by chorus #23 that splits the first sentence between power and silence on one side and smoothness on the other, opposing the rebuking of the sea and the dry soil at the bottom. Then the chorus brings the rejoicing people across in a fast nearly frenetic march between the two halves of this rebuked Red Sea. This second part can end on a vision of the greatness of God and the wisdom of the Israelis who can see this greatness. There unison is necessary, but at once the voices become free again and they start a vocal ballet that creates, builds up the unity of the people. The third part is entirely dedicated to Moses’ song. And Handel innovates anew. He alternates the chorus with 3 duets and 3 arias of the four voices: a soprano duet, a bass duet, a tenor aria, a soprano aria, an alto and tenor duet, an alto aria and the soprano with the chorus. These arias and duets are lauding the Lord. He is Moses’ strength, salvation, he is a man of war. Then the blood-lust of the enemy and then their defeat in the breath of God. God is the liberator and redeemer of his people. The heritage of the Lord is his temple, the temple contains the heritage of God, the Tables of the Covenant. The first remark as a conclusion is that Handel succeeded perfectly well to match the natural rhythm of the language and that of the music. Then he uses the voices in such a creative way that they sound even better than the instruments in the orchestra. The triumph of the Lord and a recitative can introduce Miriam, the prophetess, in her solo with the th chorus. At this moment we reach perfection and Handel is the operatic genius of the 18 century that only Mozart, in a more mundane way, could equal. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU DELLER CONSORT – PURCELL – KING ARTHUR In Shakespeare’s time they had masques, important dramatic pageants based on a play but in which long intermezzi were introduced with dances, music and singing. All that forest of creativity was pulled down and felled by the puritan revolution. But when the restoration and later the Glorious Revolution took over, the theatres were reopened and musicians tried to catch up on one wasted century and to be as good at least as 14 the continental composers. They went back to the masque but times and tastes had changed, so they expanded the genre, refusing though an all out opera, considering the English public did not want singing from beginning to end. One perfect couple of creators in that perspective was probably the poet Dryden and the composer Purcell. And the semi-opera was invented. And one of the best is “King Arthur”. Purcell took advantage of the new period to play with themes that no one would have dared even to hint at some years before, the old Saxon and non-Christian England. I refuse to use the word pagan which is a normative rejection by Christians of what is not in agreement with them. He could also imagine all kinds of entertaining scenes like an orgy or some frolicking half rape half whoring scene in the hay, and imagine it being done in Shakespearian style, only with men, transvestites in all directions. And beyond love, sex and other subtle physical and physiological activities, Purcell brought English music up to par with the continent in a general catch-up movement. New instruments, new playing techniques, new voices and actors and singers. Purcell is the first great English composer of modern times who will only be surpassed by Handel some time later. But what about this “King Arthur”? Innovations are so numerous we can’t cite them all. This particular recording only gives what they consider as essential scenes. But the singing is so clear, so brilliant, so luminous, the music is so purcellian the way I perceive it. Yet the cold scene does not satisfy me as much as the one I heard performed in La Chaise Dieu, a few years backn by Paul McCreesh’s singers and musicians. I felt this ice then. Here I find it slightly too heavy. Ice is light and can be so beautiful on window panes in the winter. When we listen to this music we understand what the puritan revolution could have cost England if it had not come to an end in its Puritanism, even if it brought parliamentary democracy – eventually – to England, and beyond it to the whole world. It is surprising how one most troubled and even for many forgotten instead of being discussed period in history can bring tremendous improvements in the arts as well as in politics. Purcell would never have been Purcell if he had not been hungry and thirsty, along with England for some fifty years. The best of this semi-opera is the absolutely mythical past Purcell and Dryden provide England with that has no real truth in it but it satisfied the new dynasty by building a British nation or identity that had never ever existed. Nations, it is well known, are nothing but opportunistic mythical creations. But when the myth is as beautiful as this one we can really understand why it was accepted so easily and still lasts centuries later. The last remark is of course the result of the date of the recording, 1978. It is absolutely perfect – for its time. Since then singers and conductors have brought more flexibility to their music performing and their singing. So this “King Arthur” is brilliant but maybe slightly too pompous or too grandiose, too much like Louis XIV in France, not enough like the humble Queen Mary II from the Netherlands. Too much bright light. Not enough chiaroscuro. But is that criticism, since we need to know this recording to appreciate the present revival of English music from 1660 to 1700. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU ALBAN BERG – LULU – PIERRE BOULEZ The prologue that describes a whole menagerie in a circus is of course unexpected, and no glass menagerie it is. And Lulu is the monster in the whole zoo. The recitative of this prologue is in a style that reminds us of Kurt Weill and German music of the 1920s that could have become a pure German style in jazz or a pure German jazz-like classical music. Alban Berg is one of these musicians who could have changed the musical profile of Germany and the world, had they had the chance to survive in their music or their bodies. Hence the recitative of good old Bach or even good young Mozart is widely renewed by the character of the circus master of ceremonies. The killing and death of the Professor confirms this use of singing. It is more a special dramatization of the language, of the dialogue that can become kind of a duet when the two actors sing together or on top of each other. Music has become part of the dramatic discourse and not one element that could be separated from the plot. The plot is music and the music is the plot. The second scene multiplies the use of language. Simple spoken discourse, then recitative with continuo, and then when Schigolch comes in, the recitative becomes different because the music becomes merged into the discourse, and both carry, build the dramatic confrontation in which Schigolch calls the heroin Lulu for the first time and in which she declares herself to be an animal, a beast. 15 That’s when Doctor Schön comes in painter with the fortune she represents as his Doctor Schön’s son, Alwa, comes in at this reactions he causes in the others. Lulu seems the police is not even a menace to her. and confronts Lulu with her many husbands and then the model. That ends dramatically with the death of the painter. moment. The dead man becomes a full character by the totally unaware of the deaths she causes around herself and We shifts then to the theater, or opera. She is with Alwa and speaks of the Prince who wants to marry her. Alwa, a composer, imagines an opera on the pattern already revealed here when the Prince arrives. This leads to a kind of play in the play, opera in the opera composed on the spot and she writes a letter. She sounds dreadfully suicidal but the music makes the suicide taste more at that moment like a menace than a reality. The menace is real but will it come through? The second act starts in shambles with more men who want Lulu and the Prince alluded to. When Alwa, the composer, comes in we expect order and the music goes back to some peaceful orderly measures. The show is going to be ordered, set back in order. But is it order he is bringing, since what he is bringing is love? Doctor Schön brings in the news of a revolution in Paris. And on the stage it is the death of Alwa that appears to be the next stage of a revolution. Then a long aria by Lulu shows her total inner disorganization and sorrow. She cannot see and understand what is happening except that men are dying around her like flies. The music at that moment is essential to introduce some chaotic sounding intervals and notes. She is falling in some apocalyptic abyss. But the vision of the revolution in Paris was only a vision and Doctor Schön himself is falling. And there arrives the police. It is at this moment an interlude is giving the whole amplification of the situation. This interlude will become the music of the film adapted from the opera the following year. We can assume Lulu has been arrested for her crimes or for being the center of so many deaths. The next scene brings together many of the man Lulu has stirred into some desire in a way or another. I will regret the school boy to be a soprano. It was standard in the 1930s. It no longer is. We have altos for these voices. Lulu still has the possibility to get out of the country. She explains how she was able to escape, helped by Countess Geschwitz, using a cholera epidemic. She is still understood to be the murderer of Doctor Schön. She proposes to leave the country to Alwa. He transforms her into music and his music will be forever dedicated to her. He submits to her and she reminds him that his father died here. He asks for her silence. In this act she is transformed by Alwa’s passion from an unconscious trap to men causing their ruin unwillingly, into a woman who knows what she is doing, enslaving men to her desire. From a dangerous sexappeal and love-appeal lady, she is turned into a conqueror. From the beast of the beginning we shift to the tamer who reveals men for what they are: wild beasts as soon as love and passion come into the picture. The third act starts somberly with one more man, a certain Rodrigo, trying to capture Lulu, this time with money and an Egyptian trip. It had started with a mass of many people singing in all directions together and it comes back to that again after the proposition-proposal that is like some blackmail. Get out or be tried here for your crimes. And this time everyone comes up with their complaints. Quite a discordant unison, a real inescapable wall into which Lulu is running head first and the music has that density of a wall, that hardness of a head banging on it uselessly. Schigolch comes back and wants to buy her a house in which he could keep her locked up and protected. Then the Marquis and Rodrigo come again and they put prison on the table to defend themselves against her and force her away. The end is approaching but Lulu tries another trick with her groom. She disguises herself and the groom does the same by exchanging their clothes. And at this very moment the police arrives and arrests the wrong Lulu though the Marquis does say it is not her. She has escaped once more. The interlude sounds like a hunt as if the pack of dogs and male hunters were led to the final moment when the beast will be dismembered by the pack. Yet it is kind of suspended by some sentences that dangle in mid air or mid scale. And another change seems to bring some more suspense or maybe some peace in that picture, a very dark picture that resounds with the drums leading up to the scaffold. In her refuge, hideout, a windowless room under a roof, she is confronted to a ghost Professor, non speaking for sure, mute and silent. The scene is looked upon by Schigolch and Alwa. They even pick the visitor’s pockets and find out he is some religious goods dealer. And he is with Lulu. As Schigolch says, God must have abandoned him. Then the countess arrives to pay her debt but she has no money, just a rolled up painting. And they discover it is Lulu’s portrait. The confrontation of the painting by the doomed painter and the real Lulu shows neither the painting nor the woman change. It becomes an anti-Dorian Gray story. She – and her portrait – remains pure and perfect in spite of her pretty crazy dissolute and retched life. She decides to go down in the street again. The Countess follows, the man stays and she comes back with a “negro”. That has to be the lowest level she can reach. It is not dark nor somber nor shady nor even shadowy. It is black. She wants money first but the black man refuses. And a fight starts. Alwa tries to 16 protect her and the black man hits him on the head and goes out. Schigolch comes back and finds Alwa unconscious. The music is literally funeral. And a violin, sad and weeping, emerges from the dark wings. The Countess finds out the body. She takes a revolver out. She begs Lulu on her knees to be kind. She wants to speak to her heart. A complete change has taken place in the music as well as in the opera in these 1930s. The music is no longer a “decoration”, a beautiful virtuosity, which it became at the end of the Middle Ages and with the Renaissance. It does not go back to the religious finality it had before of expressing the divine beauty of God’s creation and God’s teaching or message. But it is not either any more some entertaining element that th th had to please the senses as represented in the evolution in the 18 and 19 centuries. It has become part of the plot and the libretto. An opera is all sensory because it is synesthetic but this synesthesia is expressed by the merging of the various levels of the opera: the music, the singing, the language, the meaning, the plot, and of course the stage production. Music is not there to embellish the scene, or to enable the singers to glow and shine. The music builds the density of the plot, of the opera. The “instrumental and vocal” music is only part of the vast all-mediatic and all sensory music of a modern opera from plot to stage. Lulu then introduces Jack the Ripper and she negotiates her deal or trick but she is a novice and Jack is actually paid for the business. Complete reversal. She takes him to the bedroom. The Countess then sings the dirge that announces Lulu’s death that comes after her four “nein” and her death-cry. Jack comes out and washes his hands, like Pilate in another situation. The Countess closes the story with a call to Lulu the angel, which reminds us of her commitment just before Lulu’s death to the rights of women. This opera then becomes an archetype by this very story. Aren’t women who want to be free reduced to prostitution and death? Is the future of women’s rights in the fake freedom these prostitutes represent? Is the end always death in the hands of some perverse sex addict? Can such a woman only bring death and ruin to the men who love her? Can she only satisfy murderers like Jack the Ripper? And the music builds the whole story. The contradictory tendencies, interpretations, the play in the play. What we see – voyeurs that we are – is not what it means. Life is a stage on which human beings strut and play their parts. But music on the stage turns the actors into actors of themselves, twofold, double, dual actors or marionettes that are playing a mental play inside the superficial visible play, and that mental play is revealed by the music and the singing. The music reveals the second depth of the play. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU SHORTER VERSION This opera has become mythic in the world of the opera because it deals with a subject that is outrageous and frankly immoral. It starts like a circus with the presentation of the menagerie by a master of ceremonies, the most beastlike beast being the woman, Lulu of course. This woman is a femme fatale so common in the clichés of the Belle Epoque from the Eiffel Tower to just before the Black Friday. She is an easy woman, not really a prostitute, at least at the beginning. A woman who wants to be free and finds her freedom in the love, meaning sex of course and derangement of the mind, she inspires in men around her and she has no limits, no sense either. She is absolutely crazy in her hunger for victims falling to her sex appeal. Even a Prince is caught but she cannot choose and runs away to one more and one more and one more. Some actually die along the way and she becomes the beast to be hunted and tracked down. The police is coming. She is helped out and suggested to disappear in Egypt or locked up in a house for the sole pleasure of one man who would cover the trip or pay for the refuge. She refuses in the name of her freedom in a way. Then we follow her descent into hell that is represented by the last three men she will get. A dealer in religious goods that has lost God. A black man clearly called a N**** (sorry for the word but such characters were common in European culture in that period due to the colonialization of Africa and the still pending experience of nazi racism) in the libretto and the opera, and finally the anachronism of all centuries, Jack the Ripper who will of course rip her up and finish her up forever. But what is most interesting in this opera is the complete transformation of the role of music. A turnaround seems to have taken place in the music as well as in the opera in these 1930s. The music is no longer a “decoration”, a beautiful virtuosity, which it became at the end of the Middle Ages and with the Renaissance. It does not go back to the religious finality it had before of expressing the divine beauty of God’s creation and God’s teaching or message. But it is not either any more some entertaining th th element that had to please the senses as represented in the evolution in the 18 and 19 centuries. It has become part of the plot and the libretto. An opera is all sensory because it is synesthetic but this synesthesia 17 is expressed by the merging of the various levels of the opera: the music, the singing, the language, the meaning, the plot, and of course the stage production. Music is not there to embellish the scene, or to enable the singers to glow and shine. The music builds the density of the plot, of the opera. The “instrumental and vocal” music is only part of the vast all-mediatic and all sensory music of a modern opera from plot to stage. The end comes from Lulu’s own hands. Lulu introduces Jack the Ripper as her latest street conquest and she negotiates her deal or trick with him but she is a novice and Jack is actually paid by her for the business that is in no way shady at this moment but a pure suicide or execution. A complete reversal. She takes him to the bedroom. The Countess then sings the dirge that announces Lulu’s death that comes after her four “nein” and her death-cry. Jack comes out and washes his hands, like Pilate in another situation. The Countess closes the story with a call to Lulu the angel, which reminds us of her commitment just before Lulu’s death to the rights of women. This opera then becomes an archetype by this very story. Aren’t women who want to be free reduced to prostitution and death? Is the future of women’s rights in the fake freedom these prostitutes represent? Is the end always death in the hands of some perverse sex addict? Can such a woman only bring death and ruin to the men who love her? Can she only satisfy murderers like Jack the Ripper? And the music builds the whole story. The contradictory tendencies, interpretations, the play in the play. What we see – voyeurs that we are – is not what it means. Life is a stage on which human beings strut and play their parts. But music on the stage turns the actors into actors of themselves, twofold, double, dual actors or marionettes that are playing a mental play inside the superficial visible play, and that mental play is revealed by the music and the singing. The music reveals the second depth of the play. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU JEAN-CLAUDE MALGOIRE – PHIIPPE JAROUSSKY – FRIEDRICH HANDEL – AGRIPPINA This opera by Handel is some kind of myth and legend. There are several versions running around. This particular production is remarkable because it uses one male soprano (Narciso) and two male altos (Nerone and Ottone). The result is admirable and has little in common with some current versions that have Nerone sung by a tenor and Ottone sung by a baritone. Or even versions with the same for Nerone and Ottone and a a tenor for Narciso. It is the great honor of Jean-Claude Malgoire to go back to the most brilliant period of Handel’s career when he had three permanent castratos in London for operas like this Agrippina. The first element we have to point out is the music. This is one of the best operas by Handel. His music is creative, each instrument having its own color and the orchestra when playing alone melts these different instruments without erasing the characteristics of each one of them. It is a union of differences more than a homogenized mash. Malgoire is by far one of the conductors who have best understood this side of Handel’s music and who is best able to render it. His desire to go back to the original version of the opera is by far a revolution in the field because this opera, like many others by Handel and other composers, has th been dominated since the end of castratos at the end of the 18 century by tenors and baritones. The music was changed for that and we lost a lot of beauty. The second element is about the plot. In fact the plot is simple. Agrippina is manipulating everyone, including her official husband, Emperor Claudio, to impose her own son, Nerone, on the throne of Rome after Claudio’s death. She has to eliminate Ottone who is the official choice of the Emperor, but also Poppea who is flirting with everyone, Nerone, Ottone and Claudio without understanding that she is ruining her own future and that of the man she officially loves, Ottone, who accepted the throne under heavy pressure from the emperor who tried to get Poppea in exchange. Ottone felt he could not refuse. Agrippina is going to use all means available to turn Claudio against Ottone first who is rejected when Claudio hears about his love affair with Poppea. He is accused of being a traitor and menaced with death. That’s when Poppea realizes she is going to lose him for good. So she moves towards recapturing him. But Claudio will try a last attempt at punishing the treachery of Ottone by giving Poppea to Nerone and the throne to Ottone. But it is too late? Agrippina has won in the wings and Claudio is obliged to yield: the throne to Nerone, Poppea to Ottone and peace on the Roman hills. 18 On the side Agrippina had to give a good thrashing to Nerone who was enamoured with Poppea instead of only thinking of the throne. He yields in anger and reveals there what he will be later. He is an angry young man at the end of the opera whereas he had been a lusty teenager all along. In the same way Agrippina is obliged to court Claudio into accepting to let Poppea go, though he had nearly raped her at the beginning of the opera. Some say it is the triumph of immorality. In fact this is a modern analysis. It is the triumph of political expediency in a dictatorial situation. When the choice of the future leader is left in the hands of one and only one man, it can only lead to intrigues and other forms of plotting. Everyone becomes the stylus on the plotter, and there are quite a few styluses. Now we have to consider the vocal rendition of the opera. I will center this approach on Nerone. Nerone is dressed in a striped suit that is more a costume than anything else, with light and dark marroon tending towards purple vertical stripes, with a corresponding wig. His alto voice is higher than his mother’s soprano voice and he is systematically shown as a teenager, at times a child, hardly out of puberty, lusty like a wild cat who only wants one thing: Poppea. His philosophy about sex is simple: “When a woman invites her lover, pleasure is in sight. If she says “come right away”, what she means is “come and enjoy yourself”.” In other words anything the girl might say will only have one value for the boy: run, jump, dive and enjoy. This pubertal child only reads the world through his lust and we understand that is not to please his mother who thrashes him when she learns, from him, that he has been rejected by Poppea. The thrashing is so effective that he grows into an angry young man at once with an extremely violent tune: “Like a cloud that flies from the wind, I forsake, disdained her face. The fire within my breast is now extinguished, my heart is free from its chains.” His conclusion then when he finally knows Claudio’s decision is just plain simple: “I am filled with joy!” The use of a male soprano for Narciso is also a perfect choice because the first encounter of him and Agrippina at the very beginning of the opera, when she starts planning the succession of the emperor, makes her and her red wig and him and his maroon tending to crimson wig the perfect plotting couple. The two voices are nearly equal in range though very different in sexual harmonics, and the way he runs around in pleasure when accepting her mission, with little nearly effeminate steps, he looks like some kind of poodle running around the feet of his mistress. But the voice is essential: he is like the canine image of his mistress. The fact of having Ottone sung by a male alto is also very effective since he has several duets with Poppea who is a soprano. Once again in these duets the two voices are very close in range and yet very different in sexual harmonics. That gives to the numerous suffering moments in Ottone’s part a depth and a languor that expresses pain marvellously and pushes Poppea’s distant condescendence that is supposed to make him jealous, to a point where it becomes nearly sarcastic and even cruel. Ottone’s voice is perfect for his rather frequent lamenting like in: “You who hear my lament, take pity on my suffering. I lose a throne which I despise, but my treasure, whom I prize so greatly, ah! To lose her is a cruel torture, which discourages my heart.” In this dominant environment of two sopranos, one male soprano and two male altos, the baritone of Claudio sounds like the booming cannons of the state, and the basses of Pallante and Lesbo sounds like more or less unimportant voices. Pallante’s bass is amplified though to some density when he is confronted to Narciso, a male soprano, with whom he is planning to more or less prevent Agrippina from winning. There the contrast between the two voices is striking in the strong male harmonics of both and yet the distance in range. But the best part of the production is of course the costumes, the set and the stage direction; It is a show and a brilliant show at that. That’s where the revolution of the DVD reaches far and wide. It of course brings the work to millions of people who could not see it in a theatre, and won’t ever be able to see it, since operas too often have short lived lives in one place and rarely more, at times two or three with coproductions. But the DVD of this opera is superb because it uses the digital technique as a tool to enhance the show. We can see the conductor and the orchestra during the overture or the musical pauses, which is 19 impossible for most spectators in an opera house. The shooting of the opera is using the volatility and the flexibility of the camera. It keeps frontal or semi-frontal points of view to retain the vision of the show the way spectators may have had it. But it constantly moves from a full stage capture to a close-up on a face, a character, the hands, the deportment of him or her with zooming in and zooming out movements but also with following the characters on the stage. There is even one instance when a close-up image of the character (Ottone) is superimposed on the right side of the screen that keeps a full vision of the stage with the same character singing alone in the middle. The fluid editing of these movements, in fact continuous shifting from a full stage view to a close-up capture of a character with a rather slow, certainly not brusque transitory zooming in and later zooming out is essential for the rendering of the real life of the show on the stage. The fluidity of the changes makes the shifting practically un-disturbing. At the same time the singing, the acting and all that is typical of a stage production is kept and the viewer then can and must keep his mental reflective distance, which is typical of such an opera. The only thing that is supposed to completely transport us is the music, but the music becomes a background, an environment, a surrounding wrapping, maybe an inner marrow of auditory pleasure that does not block our ocular vision and hence does not make this show an all-sensorial experience that would short circuit the mental reflective distance that is the means through and with which we capture the full beauty of the opera. To conclude here I will say that the CD is perfect for your auditory pleasure but the DVD is the acme of perception for your full enjoyment of the opera. And that is the second level of the DVD revolution. It enables these extremely rich, and by the way extremely expensive, shows to become a real and full experience to millions of people. More and more operas are captured on DVD within twelve months after the production, at times faster, since the operas will not go on tours and the DVD becomes a tremendous financial income. What’s more the DVD can provide the audience with subtitles (the original ones) and a set of languages (English, German, French, Spanish), which is a good economy of scale when compared with the printed translations for the CD. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU Cet opéra de Haendel a un réputation mythique. Il en existe plusieurs versions. Celle-ci est remarquable dans le fait qu’elle a conservé un soprano mâle pour Narciso, et deux altos mâles pour Nerone et Ottone. Le résultat est admirable et a peu à voir avec les productions qui ont remplacé les altos mâles par un ténor pour Nérone et un baryton pour Ottone. Il existe même une version avec en plus Narciso chanté par un ténor. C’est donc le grand honneur de Malgoire d’avoir rétabli la version originale qui s’était perdue ème dans les coulisses du 19 siècle quand les castrats avaient disparu. Il faut d’abord parler de la musique. C’est là probablement un des meilleurs opéras de Haendel. Sa musique est créative en diable pour son siècle et encore pour aujourd’hui. Chaque instrument a son originalité et il sait les fondre en un ensemble qui conserve les particularités de chacun au lieu de faire une bouillie homogénéisée. Malgoire est un des chefs d’orchestre les plus à même de rendre cette particularité. Son désir d’en revenir à la version originale va dans ce sens et cela est supérieur à toutes les tentatives fondées sur une réécriture supprimant les voix de soprano et altos mâles. Le tout est d’une beauté sensible. Le second élément à noter est l’intrigue. Elle est simple et connue. Claudius allant mourir, Agrippine fait des pieds et des mains pour imposer son fils Néron contre le favori de Claudius, Othon. Elle élimine celui-ci en faisant savoir à l’empereur qu’Othon ne tient pas sa promesse de céder Poppée. Il devient un traitre et est menacé de mort. Othon avait accepté le trône à condition de céder Poppée. Agrippine doit ensuite se débarrasser de Poppée que son propre fils, Néron regarde avec des yeux lubriques. Mais quand Othon accusé de traitrise se voit rejeté de tous, y compris de Poppée, il fait machine arrière et reconquiert Poppée. Claudius essaiera une dernière tentative de punir Othon en donnant Poppée à Néron et le trône à Othon, mais Agrippine a eu le dessus dans les coulisses et Claudius cède. Pour arriver à ses fins Agrippine aura du fesser Néron quand il est venu lui demander son aide pour conquérir Poppée qui venait de le rejeter, et ensuite de charmer Claudius pour qu’il accepte de ne pas retenir Poppée. Claudius alors cède le trône à Néron et Poppée à Othon. La paix romaine triomphe. Néron apparaît dans cette production, avec son costume zébré vertical de raies bordeaux virant au violet alternant pâle ou profond, et sa perruque de même couleur, comme un jeune homme en colère révélant ce qu’il sera plus tard après avoir été un adolescent à peine pubère et profondément lubrique tout du long. 20 Certains disent que c’est le triomphe de l’immoralité. Cela est une interprétation moderne qui a peu à ème voir avec le 18 siècle, même anglais. Il s’agit d’une intrique d’opportunisme politique dans une dictature. Quand le choix du successeur d’un dirigeant est le fait d’une seule personne, qui plus est ce dirigeant, toutes les intrigues possibles deviennent une banalité. On peut trouver cela immoral. Mais l’est-ce plus que la manipulation des masses par les médias interposés dans une démocratie élective ? A ce niveau le personnage de Néron est une parfaite illustration de l’opportuniste politique sur base de l’adolescent capricieux qui ne prend jamais un non comme une réponse à ses exigences, sexuelles bien sûr. C’est la voie la plus sûr pour produire un pervers tyrannique qui aimera torturer ceux qu’il aimera au point de les haïr. Mais la plus grande valeur de cette production c’’est bien sûr les voix. Que Narciso soit chanté par un soprano mâle donne au duo avec Agrippine du début une dimension imprévue, car il a le même registre qu’Agrippine mais avec des harmoniques sexuelles fortement différentes. Il court à petit pas autour d’Agrippine, de façon quasiment efféminée, et cela le transforme en une espèce de caniche tournant en jappant autour de sa maîtresse. Cela n’est possible qu’avec cette voix. Malgoire en joue pleinement. Qu’Othon soit chanté par un alto mâle permet des effets similaires par contraste avec la voix de soprano de Poppée dans les nombreuses confrontations entre eux. Othon a un registre légèrement plus bas que Poppée mais des harmoniques sexuelles fortement différentes. Cela permet à Othon de prendre un ton extrêmement triste et presque larmoyant, on pourrait dire même pleurnicheur, quand il se plaint de son sort et de la cruauté de Poppée. C’est que Poppée joue le grand jeu quand elle décide de le reconquérir en le rendant jaloux de Claudius avec lequel elle prétend avoir une relation. Dans ce contexte de dominance de trois sopranos et de deux altos, le baryton de Claudius est la voix de la puissance qui tonne comme autant de cannons que de syllabes. Les basses de Pallas et Lesbo sont comme marginalisée de ce fait, bien que Pallas prenne un peu de valeur quand confronté au soprano mâle Narcisse il est comme la voix profonde de la contre intrigue qui veut empêcher Agrippine d’avoir le dernier mot. Mais le meilleur de la production restent les costumes, le décor et la direction d’acteurs. Et c’est là justement que la révolution du DVD est la plus claire. Non seulement le DVD permet à un spectacle d’atteindre des millions de gens qui n’ont pas pu et ne pourraient de toute façon pas voir le spectacle, mais en plus les moyens techniques derrière un DVD permettent de donner au spectacle une dimension nouvelle. Le film permet de voir l’orchestre pendant l’ouverture et les pauses musicales, ce qui est impossible dans un opéra. La prise de vue et le cadrage à la fois fluides, volatiles et flexibles permettent, tout en gardant une vision frontale ou frontale latérale, de suivre les acteurs et de sans cesse passer d’un plan d’ensemble à un gros plan sur un visage, un acteur, ses mains, son action, ses déplacements que la caméra peut aisément suivre. L’utilisation du zoom avant et du zoom arrière permet sans cesse de passer de l’un à l’autre et cela est fait à une vitesse suffisamment lente pour que l’on ne sente pas de rupture. On a même un plan où Othon apparaît en gros plan à droite sur un fond de scène complète où il chante au centre. Sans abuser des effets spéciaux de la caméra et du montage numériques ce DVD a une flexibilité telle que l’on suit avec plaisir et aucune lassitude ces mouvements de caméra. En même temps le DVD conserve tous les éléments d’un spectacle de scène : la musique, les acteurs, les costumes, la diction bien sûr. Le spectateur peut donc conserver ainsi sa distance mentale réflexive typique d’un spectacle de théâtre et nécessaire pour sa bonne réception par le public. Seule la musique emporte le spectateur dans un plaisir auditif total, mais le fait que la scène est complète et que les acteurs chantent des mots qui ont un sens permet au spectateur de garder une distance dans le visuel faisant de la musique un arrière plan, un environnement, un emballage cadeau autant qu’une moelle profonde de plaisir auditif pour un spectacle visuel qui ne permet pas l’ensevelissement sensoriel total qui suspendrait la distance mentale critique comme dans un spectacle télévisuel. Ce sont ces DVD qui sont la preuve que ce n’est pas l’écran qui fait le média mais bien la captation et la réception du produit qui font ce média et donc la différence entre un spectacle de théâtre, un film de cinéma et une émission, même dramatique, de télévision. La révolution du DVD prouve la véracité des idées de Marshall MacLuhan alors même qu’il n’a jamais pu connaître ni la révolution Internet ni la révolution du DVD. Pour conclure on voit que le CD donne le plaisir auditif de cette production mais que le DVD donne le plaisir visuel qui s’ajoute au précédent. Pour les opéras qui sont des productions lourdes et chères, donc 21 qui ne peuvent tenir une scène qu’un nombre limité de fois (d’où une réception vivante sélective pour ne pas dire élitiste) et qui peuvent difficilement tourner, sauf dans le cas de coproductions, le DVD permet au spectacle d’atteindre des millions de spectateurs dans le monde entier. De plus les sous-titres en langue originelle et dans le cas présent en anglais, allemand, français, et espagnol permettent une réception de qualité dans des aires géographiques sans proportions avec le lieu de production ; De plus en plus et ce sous six à douze mois, ces productions sont en DVD pour le monde entier, ce qui est en soi un immense progrès de diffusion de la culture, sans parler des économies d’échelle que les sous-titres qui remplacent l’impression papier du livret et de ses traductions permettent. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU GEORG FRIEDRICH HANDEL – NICHOLAS McGEGAN – JUDAS MACCABAEUS The overture swiftly shifts to dramatic music, both tensely animated and gravely majestic. The first singing is some mourning yet forceful dirge, a call for future struggle and freedom, a successor to dead Mattathias. The story is told by an Israelian man and an Israelian woman: the man is a mezzo-soprano and the woman a soprano. A very feminine story telling though the mezzo-soprano expresses some deep nearly subterranean contradiction, the frustration of captivity, the death of a leader, the still unclear future. The chorus says it all: “With words that weep and tears that speak”, beautiful double metaphor and oxymoron. Simon taking over the recitative gives a male profundity to the call and the next aria of the Israelian woman balances the vision between somberness and hope, the hope of salvation from God. The binary style of the language is Shakespearian and very effective when amplified by the music: “And Grant a leader bold and brave, If not to conquer, born to save” And the ternary language of the coming fight is disruptive, as it should be: “In defence of your nation, religion and laws”. The whole British nationalism and state of law invested in that religious opera. And this ternary language is amplified at once by Judas Maccabaeus: “Call forth / thy pow’rs, / my soul, // and dare // The con- / flict of un- / -equal war.” And this double ternary period (articulated on a in-between iamb) is of course Solomon’s number, a basic Jewish symbol, a basic symbol of the greatest British literature and art, the disruption brought by the fight for freedom, a success-bound fight borne by courage, longing and devotion. And this Jewish symbolism is then amplified by the Israelian woman who gives a recitative, then a first aria and a second aria, and the Israelian man comes with a recitative, an aria, and a duet of the two to close up the symbolism. And this long moment in the opera is dedicated to “liberty”, introduced as “sweet liberty” by Judas and then amplified by the two Israelian man and woman as “ever-smiling liberty” and five mention of this liberty which makes six with Judas’s, thus endorsed by the Israelians as their champion, and blessed by a quadruple binary chorus: “Lead on, / lead on! // Judah / disdains /// The gal- / -ling load // of hos- / -tile chains.” That quadruple binary pattern is absolute equilibrium in Shakespeare, and it makes an octagon, the symbol of the resurrection and second coming of Jesus Christ. Handel is a perfect Shakespearian who turns Shakespeare’s linguistic music into pure music. The second act starts with a music that is so powerful we know the expected miracle has taken place and that music is based on the hyper dynamic rhythm of a trochee followed by an iamb creating a maelstrom with the inversion of stresses de-multiplied by the music itself. The victory was won and everyone is celebrating it and the newly re-conquered liberty. Handel takes some fine deep pleasure at playing on some iambic rhythm like in Judas’s mouth “How vain is man, who boasts in fight” and his playing on the irregularity of the next line makes it great though imperfect: “The valour of gigantic might!” His musical emphasis on “gan” rebalances the uneven rhythm that could only be saved into iamb-anapest-anapest by moving the stress onto “gi”, which he refuses to do. The music salvages a bad line and makes it hyper-powerful. That’s when he brings the Messenger to announce the bad news of the counter attack of the Egyptians. This moment is crucial in the opera and Handel had kept the male alto in store for it. That male alto brings a voice that stands at odds with all others and that brings the bad news. Simon adds some more musical magic in his aria when he transform the bad line “His glory to raise”, iamb-anapest, into a heroic moment. But he can also make a prodigy with a triple binary line like: “and call the brave, // and on- / -ly brave, / around” which is a perfect Solomon’s number leaning on the quadruple first half. We get both the balance of the iambic rhythm and the tremendous dynamism of that triple iambic rhythm, a dynamism that leads directly to a military mobilization against the new attack. 22 The second act comes to an end with a declaration of faith in God both extremely powerful and joyful as if the faith in God of the Israelians was able to bring anyone through any challenge. But the third act starts with restraint that also sounds like somber depth, the depth that comes from the consciousness of being one with God and his creation, emphasized by the somber mezzo-soprano voice. The battle is raging and they are expecting the good news of course any time and dreading the bad one any time too. It is the male alto voice of the messenger that brings the news, and it is good. The voice expresses so well the break in the fabric of history and the relief of the people. The celebration of the victory is very tamed and even docile in a way with solos, duets and choruses on joyful airs but with no ostentation, at most a few blaring moments of trumpets and drums, slightly more triumphant towards the end. Judas will bring the real formula of that victorious heroism: Eleazar who “triumph’d in a glorious death”. This is nearly a cliché in English culture with Nelson as the archetype of that hero for two centuries. The final touch is given by the representative of Rome who brings the support of the Senate, thus completing the victory. And the opera closes on some praise of the victory but maybe slightly too mundane and too contained and moderate. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU VIVALDI – JUDITHA TRIUMPHANS Enter this emblematic Catholic Biblical oratorio showing one of the most discussed and even rejected female character in the Old Testament, the famous and infamous Judith. You know at once you are in Vivaldi with the strings, oboes, clarinets and pipes. The music sounds kind of military with percussions, trumpets and timpani but also mundane with the mandolin and the strings, to the point of being even nostalgic and the violins are the voice of this change in tone. But the first surprise is to hear a soprano in the role of Holophernes instead of a male voice. Is Italy that deprived of altos? And it is redoubled with Holophernes’ servant, Bagoas, a soprano too. The world of men, warriors, heroes reduced to women when castratos were meant, the voice of heroes. Then Judith appears, the enemy, the Israelis Holophernes is supposed to punish along with her rebellious tribes, ordered by Nabuchednezzar and she is the third soprano. Something’s missing. Something is incorrect. We miss the essential symbolism Vivaldi must have intended, the use of sexual attraction to defeat the victor in one sword blow and this from the only person that can attract Holophernes’ sexual lust, a woman, provided Holophernes is a man, a warrior, a hero, a general. And Bagaos’s Aria in the first act, “Quamvis ferro”, cannot render the opposition of the top and the bottom of an alto’s range in high drives and high jumps from the one to the other. Same thing with Holophernes is opposed to Judith who is a soprano and works on the top of her vocal range. I would love to have Jazoussky and Expert in these two roles of Bagoas and Holophernes. To understand the problem we must know the argument. The Israelis had refused to serve Nabuchednezzar in one of his wars. After his victory he sends his general Holophernes to punish all these tribes. The Jewish elders are ready to submit to all the punishments he wants, including military defeat and slavery without even fighting. That’s when Judith, a widow, decides to deceive Holophernes and redress the elders. She goes and submits to Holophernes exposing the cowardice and greedy egotism of the Israelis. Then she manages to seduce him, get him drunk and behead him with his own sword. She is the new David who killed Goliath with a stone and then beheaded him with Goliath’s own sword. Judith just replaced the stone with wine and the sling with her sex. On the following day the Israelis repulse the Babylonian army. Not for long though since they will be enslaved by Nabuchednezzar, the Temple destroyed and looted, but that leads to Daniel. The opposition between two altos and two sopranos must embody the opposition between men and women, warriors and civilians, heroes and homemakers, Babylonians and Jews, and the whole Babylonian Persian civilization as opposed to the Jewish Semitic tradition. I remember a production by Malgoire in which he dressed Judith in purple and the Babylonians in yellow and red. I had a discussion with him on the justifiable use of historically correct symbolism if it gets interfered with by more modern symbolisms, yellow the symbol of Jews in our consciousness and red the color of the socialist president then. The first act concludes with a chorus singing the glory of Judith at this point of the story when she is on the verge of conquering Holophernes, using the word “triumphando” as if her victory was going to be a military, quasi Roman triumph of a victorious general coming back to Rome. 23 The second act starts with a mezzo soprano in the role of Ozias, the Jewish prophet, priest who detains, retains and proclaims the knowledge of history, fate, God in our everyday life. How can the voice of God be a woman’s, even a mezzo soprano’s? In pure Jewish tradition Ozias has to be a male voice. He is the divine equivalent in the Temple of the Jews to Holophernes in Nabuchednezzar’s army. The voice of the heart, soul, faith of the Israelis, the Jews. This opposition of a man against two women, Judith and her servant, is the visualization of that between Judith and the Jewish elders, courage and hypocritical cowardice. The second act brings the seducing of Holphernes by twisted-tongued Judith. Holophernes ends up drunk. Judith organizes the vigil and discovers the sword. At this moment she takes off and kills him from a dark tempestuous sky of lightning, thunder and storm and she picks the head and runs away with her servant Abra. The music gallops away with Abra’s Aria “Qui fulgida per se”. The furor of Bagoas when he discovers the crime is unbearable in many ways, in violence and exploding frustration. ,How we regret at this moment we are having a soprano. Judith can finally return to the Israelis and her arrival is announced, described and introduced into Berthulia by Ozias. Judith will never come on the stage again to deliver Holoohernes’s bloody head. Ozias can now conclude his tale with a praise of Venice in the name of a certain Vivaldi. The final chorus is a martial song of victory. Beyond the celebration of Venice as the Queen of the Sea, the opera is a sure sign of the important movement at work in Europe at the time, a beginning that will eventually lead to the liberation of women. Vivaldi like others who celebrated or will celebrate women, among others Magdalena at the feet of the Christ, chose to celebrate a rare Biblical heroin who saves with her sex appeal and courage the independence of Israel in front of her domineering neighbors of Babylon. Women arise and fight for God and humanity to discard and push away all dangers from enemies. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU MOZART LA FINTA GIARDINIERA An early opera, but also an opera buffa. The story is thus told in long recitatives, which of course enhances the arias. But it gives to the opera a rather slow rhythm. But it is true the plot is complex and Mozart does not hesitate to paint extreme situations. The Marchesina Violante is stabbed nearly to death by the man she loves, the Contino Belfiore. Then the whole story is the search for and hunt of if not down of this Contino by the Marchesina under the disguise of a gardener. But Mozart multiplies the love affairs or courting episodes. The local Il Podesta, an officer of justice, tries to seduce the gardener and the atmosphere crumbles down into open hostility and fights among the various characters and the Contino is even dragged to a court where he is to be tried for his attempted assassination of the Marchesina. Mozart obviously enjoys the very many conflicts he builds up around this love story that could have turned into a tragedy in nearly all the scenes. But in the end love will triumph in what some would consider a totally utopian happy ending. It is quite obvious Mozart follows his time with the disguised characters and the mixing of tragic events and pure comedy that is at times melodramatic. He also reflects the mounting criticism of the nobility in the privileges they have and the fact they can feel or even behave as if they were not controlled by general laws and rules, and hardly by ethical norms. In that line Mozart is close to Marivaux (and beyond, Shakespeare) and he announces his major operas, still to some, and Beaumarchais’s Figaro’s Wedding. What is also interesting is that Mozart’s criticism of the aristocratic order is always hardly disguised, even if not openly formulated. The free mason is always lurking behind the music. The music itself is already building up what the major operas will be and the recitatives are a lot more musical and elaborate than they often were at the time, though Handel had gotten rid of them altogether. This recording being live we also have all the stage noises that make the opera lively even if the clapping after some of the arias are an oldfashioned habit. The recording was done in 1989 in Brussels. Today the audience has learned a little bit more how to enjoy the music and not slice it up with clapping intrusions. I will also regret that Ramiro is a soprano against his obvious sex and for no really justifiable reason, which definitely mutilates the beautiful aria in the second act “Dolce d’amor compagna”. But the most striking trait is that each of the three acts has a finale but that the first two finales are extremely long and thus become highly dramatic and Mozart uses all the possibilities of musical expressivity and of duets to build a high level of tension, of course reflected in the duets that oppose major tones to minor tones preventing all 24 explosions of joy but intensifying the sadness of the conflictual atmosphere in these two finales. We have a full picture of what Mozart’s art was going to produce later when recitatives will be reduced to as little as possible. The finale of the second act is actually coming after and continuing two arias and one cavatina nearly making it twice as long. That continuous singing is so dynamic and with such marvelously whirling and twirling melodies and tempos that it becomes pure pleasure. And the very long duet of il Contino and Sandrina in which love triumphs and steps over all differences and oppositions nearly at the end of the third act is a major slice of beauty in which every element expresses the contradictions, dilemmas, rivalries and other conflictual ambitions and desires. The recitative that follows and bridges the gap to the third and last finale is no recitative indeed because it is redeemed into a multiple duet with all characters leading to the final chorus that explodes in pure joy. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU MOZART - MITHRIDATE Mozart and love again. Here he intertwines love and politics with two sons and the promised wife of their father, plus the daughter of a foreign king. Mitridate starts with having his own death announced. This leads to his younger son’s declaring his love to his father’s promised wife and to his elder son’s proclaiming himself king. What a surprise when their father turns up with a foreign princess for his elder son as a mark of a new political alliance against the Romans. But our own surprise is that the two sons and the governor of Ninfea are sung by two sopranos and one mezzo-soprano instead of altos. That makes the whole text mysterious if not sibylline. . And the recording is recent and was done in Utrecht. Are the Dutch that low in altos? And the music is so light, so expressive, the recitative so elaborate. Mozart is approaching here his best level of operatic composition. We are reduced to imagining what it could have been with altos. For example the aria “Soffre in mio cor con pace” by Sifare, the younger son. Jaroussky would be so good in that piece. The question of fighting against the Romans or signing an alliance is looming high behind these contradictions. Mitridate moves toward imprisoning his sons and his ex-promised wife. It is the attack of the Romans who disembark on the coast that prevents the worst ending: executing all these traitors. In fact Mitridate is mortally wounded and his elder son sets the Roman fleet on fire. Mitridate has enough time to give his ex-promised wife to his younger son and his crown to his elder son. A happy ending both politically and sentimentally, in spite of the possible alliance of the elder son with the Romans that this elder son in the end rejects. The normal conclusion then is that the alliance against the Romans has been strengthened. But was it strengthened only by political virtue or was it deepened by the satisfaction of love and love expectations? The question is answered by the events themselves. Without love nothing would have been possible. And here again Mozart submits politics to love and not the reverse. Mozart reaches in this opera some extraordinary moments when expressing antagonistic feelings like in Mitridate’s aria “”Tu, che fedel mi sei” addressed to his younger son and his ex-wife. He is divided as for his son since he vindicates him as his son and yet he is jealous, and this jealousy is shifted from his rival, his son, to the prey, to the woman, his ex-promised wife that he rejects with violence though this only shows his love and his desire. An aria addressed to two people with mixed feelings toward both. This is a piece of pure pleasure. But the pleasure is marred by the mezzo soprano in the elder son’s aria “Son reo”. We can only imagine what Robert Expert would have done of it. The tone is so ambiguous too, typically Handelian, divided between his filial fidelity to his father and his disagreement with him on the policy to choose, both in private love affairs and in public military fights. And we feel that frustration again in the one on one scene with the younger son and the ex-promised wife of Mitridate, Two sopranos that should not have been two. The younger son does not come out in anyway with his own personality. And the duet “Se viver non degg’io” is so dramatic that it seems to have been in a way emasculated by this artistic choice that betrays the situation and the music. Ah! The ghostly absence of Jaroussky there. And this duet is supposed to close up the second act when the Romans are menacing and Mitridate is promising prison if not death to his two sons and his ex- 25 promised wife. The third act brings the total reversal of all dangers and menaces. The elder son, liberated by the Roman representative, decides to follow the way of “glory and honor”. And he sets the Roman fleet on fire, thus causing their defeat. But a dying wounded Mitridate will just be able to see and in a way bless the good ending. He will be able to forgive everyone and the elder son will marry the Parthian princess his father had brought back for him, the younger son will be entrusted with the ex-promised wife of Mitridate and then the final brilliant ending can come in the form of a quintet. The new alliance of love and politics: Politics can only be right if based on love and love can only be right if it prolongs or deepens politics, in spite of the fact it is a quintet with five women instead of two and three altos. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU MENDELSSOHN – A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM This Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the Shakespearian plays that had a career of its own, along with Romeo and Juliet, in the musical field. Ballets, operas, and all other possibilities, plus of course th numerous cinematographic adaptations. Here is the music Mendelssohn added to the play in the 19 century in the line of what Purcell did and is known as a semi-opera. The overture is a pretty brave piece that tries to musically recreate the atmosphere of the play split into many places, characters, plots and derangements. On the one side the court of Theseus. On the other beside the court of Titania, the Queen of Fairies. On the one hand the craftsmen and their play, on the other hand the marvelous, mischievous, adorable love object of all our phantasms, be we men as well as women, maybe not for the same reasons but love fascination all the same, that little juicy and both besotting and enamourable Puck. And I probably forget to oppose the city and the forest, the day and the night, and many other contrasting elements. Mendelssohn plays on the instruments in the orchestra, the tones of some of them, and of course the flavors he distributes here and there making us salivate at this deranged disorder and this harmonic chaos that are, both of them, so fascinating and mesmerizing. We fall into this Puckian trap at once. We are in the labyrinthine corridors of the surreal more than supernatural nightmarish dreamscape of that world famous and mythic play. And even a small piece of waltz can rock the cradle of our credulity. That is an overture and we are ready to enter the plot. Often will that spinning, whirling, tumbling, turning mode will come back in the smaller pieces without getting to a waltz. We are supposed to get light-headed, light-hearted and experience the vertigo of the fairy tale as we go down, drop and dive into the nocturnal world of pansies and lilies. And we will not be surprised by the Wedding March. It is grand, grandiose, brilliant. After all four couples get married or remarried at the same time, which makes eight people and that is the very number of the second coming of Jesus, the end of the world, paradise for all the worthy, eternal life for us all in the messianic Jerusalem, layer after layer of the gems that compose the walls of this dreamland city? And the funeral march is just as right, perfect, in tone and in harmony, and we recognize it at once as if we had lived in that other country all our life. The finale is sad, slow and the waltz of the overture comes back as if it were sad to be back to normal, to wake up in the ordinary world with hardly a full recollection of this other world that visited us. This particular recording directed by Herreweghe is a real marvel though I find his music slightly too clear, full of light, maybe even heavy and that takes away the fog, the mist and the magic of the play. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU MOZART – ASCANIO IN ALBA Light music indeed. The overture is a sublime piece of lightness and brightness that flutter around in our ears. The whole opera is dedicated to Venus and her son Ascanio, to love and its goddess, though the opening chorus introduces liberty as its main objective. Mozart is so modern then to pretend that love is a road to liberty: without liberty there can’t be love. And Venus is so brilliant in her soprano voice with all the necessary embellishments Mozart provides her with. 26 th But Ascanio sung by a mezzo soprano loses the essential element of this 18 century, the famous Italian castrati. It would have been so much better to have had a male alto rather than a female mezzo soprano. For a recent (2002) recording in Utrecht I am surprised to have to face the confrontation of mother and son in the vocal garb of two women. A voice is not only a question of range but also of all the harmonics provided by the physical body of the singer. That’s also quite audible in Ascanio’s solo piece opening the second scene. It lacks the somberness a male voice would have added. The argument is typical of Marivaux’s comedies. One lover turns transvestite to observe the other lover and test her or his love. Here Ascanio plays the transvestite and that fits him so well, especially with the pleasant sounding songs, ritornellos or arias Mozart entrusts him with, and the mezzo soprano tries to give her singing the worried depth it deserves. The meeting of Ascanio and the fawn is promising though the couple mezzo-soprano-soprano gives it too much femininity, so that the chorus of the shepherds stands out genially though it should have extended the duet. This choice of two women for two men is taking a lot of femininity out of the tale and the music, and that makes Mozart sound slightly precious, light, entertaining instead of deeply concerned by the impossibility in the real world to have love and liberty together. In other words Don Giovanni is lurking behind this entertaining opera but having women in the place of men is drastically reducing the power and force of the message, all the more so visually in a full operatic production. When Aceste finally appears we are thankful he is a tenor, a man, just like the shepherds. This only man is a priest hence moral authority. He cannot endorse the liberty-loving love singing of both Ascanio and the fawn. It makes love the appanage of only women. When Silvia arrives on the stage and starts singing the beauty of freely-chosen love she sounds so powerful and she should be the female echo of the careful caution of Ascanio who does not want to be fooled by a woman. Silvia’s serious tone is in contradiction with the generally accepted idea that women are light and have to fall. Mozart regenerates women in the most convincing way he can: his music. We then feel fully what we missed with Ascanio who should have regenerated the generally accepted idea that men just take what they desire and don’t care for the damage they may cause. That is contained in the music, in the singing, in the voices. And that’s why a man must be a man and a woman a woman. It is not enough for Venus to call Ascanio her son and for Aceste to call Silvia his daughter. In Italian only the last vowels of the two words change from filio to filia and the difference between an alto and a mezzo soprano is just as subtle and small but fully significant. I particularly like the very expressive recitative that leads the same singer to an aria and then to a conclusion provided by the shepherdesses’ chorus. Three facets of the opera for one character who is thus captured as deep, reflexive and even ethical, like Silvia at the beginning of the second act. And we can imagine what the confrontation of that Silvia with Ascanio would have been if Ascanio had really been what he is called, a garzon, a boy. And when the fawn joins them, what could it have been if he had been a real fawn and not a female, hence a nymph, particularly the long aria ‘Dal tuo gentil sembiante’ and its ten odd minutes. So when the opera comes to an end and Ascanio has discovered the full love Silvia feels for him and Silvia has found the depth of Ascanio’s love, when Venus guarantees this perfect free and loving union, Mozart can move to politics, which is always natural with this free mason. The city of Alba will flourish because of the love that is the melting pot of its destiny, And what’s more Aeneas will be able to flourish for ever through his descendants procreated and reared within the sacred perfection of free love. The future of human history is thus founded on love as the guarantee of good fortunes and riches, and on the succession of human generations, each one descending from the previous one, each one ascending from the same previous one. This descending ascendance is the union of the two human sexes in love. And politics have to be love and nothing but love. Aceste, as a priest and father, is thus equaled to Venus, as a goddess and mother. We feel here the relation of Mozart with his own father to whom he was always grateful, even if fearful and awed, and with his own son too for whom he composed the famous story of the Magic Flute. Mozart is the most mature child of music or the most immature adult who still believes in love. He may even reach the intensity of his Requiem in some pieces like the chorus ‘Sendi celeste venere’. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU MOZART – LA FINTA SEMPLICE 27 The subject is love, love again, love forever. No other intricacies or depth. An Italian charming entertainment. Then what makes this particular recording or even Mozart’s music interesting? The first element that attracts our ears is the light and brilliantly flexible music. Definitely not too many notes but all the little notes make the musical flow smooth and harmonious. But then you are not submerged under all kinds of vocal endeavors and exploits. Simple and yet charming musical sentences that sound just right and on a par with the subject: light and smooth. The second element is the voices. I find the two basses absolutely outstanding. Mozart uses their lower range in order to create some somber atmosphere to densify a subject that is not exactly dramatic. And he even plays on the contrast between one bass and a tenor, one going down into the lower and somber range of his voice, the other going rather up into the higher range of his, to create some dramatic tension only with the voices since the plot is not exactly tragic and that leads to the marvelous aria of the tenor who weaves a whole thick cloth of impossible choices, “vogliate or non vogliate”, going up and down like some funfair ride that could make you land sick or air sick, as you like it. I must also admit that Rosina is quite convincing in her slightly elaborate singing. Yet I find the recitatives slightly long. Mozart is telling us a story but he uses too many words instead of arias and duets. Still young, probably, but also following his time, not yet stepping ahead of it. He is learning his trade, and is yet so brilliant even if caressing the Viennese social cat in the right direction and avoiding any ruffling gesture. But the arias sound so beautiful when they come, even if slightly too short. The second act is supposed to bring havoc on the stage and it does. Too much wine, all kinds of antics, a duel and many fights. But altogether it sounds rather peaceful and calm. With a few very expressive arias. The duet of the eighth scene sure is dynamic and it wakes up the slumbering music and that leads us to a fast, vivacious final scene in which all characters are taking part. The third act is short because the end of the opera is simple. Love is rewarded and negative feelings are sidetracked. Simone opens the act with a slightly martial aria which fits him since he is the local sergeant. Then back into love and love pangs and other big bangs. Ninetta is just mesmerized by love. Giacinta makes it a lot more dramatic. And Fracasso more or less encourages people into a way that could lead to a tragedy. Fracasso, as a captain, sees love as a war and when he speaks of it he becomes slightly mellow in his battle plan that has to lead to the victory of love, but the fight does not announce itself as heroic in any way, rather a weak, even kind of messy, campaign. The Finale is just clear and cloudless like a summer sky. Polidoro and Rosina, the supposed mentally disabled people, get married even if rejected by many. Mozart plays with our good sense and shows that real love has nothing to do with money or reason, and this is a fact beyond any kind of sanity. Love is in-sanity and can only be achieved by insane people. That’s his wink at us telling us that the world is little that cannot live to this simple concept that love is the beating heart of life. And then we are pushed aback by the last swinging turn in the opera when Rosina decides to marry Cassandro and to reject Polidoro. And there Mozart is still tied up to his world. The woman falls for the miser and we can wonder why. Money? Can, a miser love a woman more than his money? Mozart dreams an insane change in a world that imposes its vanity to the poet and artist. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU PIZZETTI – KARAJAN – MORD IN DER CATHEDRALE – 1998 This opera follows the play by T.S. Eliot very closely. Thomas Beckett comes back to Canterbury after seven years of exile and disgrace. The music and the choruses express the excitement and fear they feel at this moment with the women on one side speaking for the people and the three priests speaking for the church, squeezed between the hammer and the anvil. The conflict is not really explained: a question of precedence of church justice over royal justice. Thomas Beckett refused to yield to King Henry II and asserted that the question in discussion was then to be decided by the church and not by the king according to the constitution of Clarendon. When the Archbishop speaks some peace and quiet is implanted into the scene. The transition to the study and the tempters is dramatic enough for us to know there is a change in mood, action and time. The first tempter proposes the pleasures of life that would come from accepting the King’s authority. Beckett refuses due to 28 his age, though his conclusion, once the tempter is gone, is far from optimistic about the world, his world. “Voices in sleep wake up to life a dead world”. In fact it is the world that is brought back to him. But this world is dead for him who is beyond it. The second tempter proposes power provided he accepts to curb the church to the king, to yield his religious duty and mission to serving the king. He strongly refuses this depreciation of the church of God to flatter the king into some omnipotence. The chorus of women creates some reflective moment before the third tempter. It also build the righteousness of the Archbishop. The third tempter proposes an alliance of the church and the barons, which he calls the people, against the king. Thomas Beckett refuses in the name of the godly nature of the king’s power. No one can go against it except God. The fourth tempter proposes Beckett to stand against the king and the barons and to become a martyr wilfully. A king dies and is replaced. A martyr reaches greatness in heaven and for ever. Thomas refuses because his ambition would mean damnation. Only God can decides on such matters. The conclusion comes from both the women’s chorus and the four tempters. The women support the Archbishop and the conclusion comes from the first tempter. Beckett is his own enemy. But Beckett’s conclusion is that he has to stick to what is good no matter what. And he expresses his fear of what may come in very Christic words but rewritten in feudal terms. So instead of a chalice, It is a sword that has to be moved away by God. The first act ends on the first two evocations of the sword and the tip of the sword. These two mentions are also present in the play and in the film: the sword’s end and the swords’ points. Contemplative and airlike Intermezzo music though slightly reverberating with some anguish. First, an evocation of Christ and Christmas, the birth of the Saviour. Musical transition with violins trying to lift you up into the sky, a bassoon roaming low and far under and behind. The second part is about the Passion. Martyrdom is not a fatality, not something men can decide. But Beckett envisages himself as a martyr. He accepts the perspective. Second act. The women sing Christmas and try to remain optimistic though they admit they have to wait and time is short. The flute is playing behind to create some birdlike effect. But the priests come and they introduce martyrdom with Latin slightly and loosely Gregorian responses. First Saint Stephen and then Saint John. The arrival of the knights is introduced by some strong music, dark and martial. The confrontation is very physical, harsh, brutal. The knights are there to impose then king’s will and Beckett is there not to yield one iota of church justice or privileges. Then that confrontation ends with the word sword. We know the real mission: to neutralize or eliminate the Archbishop. These swords rhyme with words in the play and the film. Here in German the rhyme is lost. The women emphasize the tragic moment with some ripped music with high jumps and deep dives that tear up the harmony like the souls of these ladies are torn up by the events. The priests advise Beckett to fly, escape, at least take refuge in the cathedral. He rejects it all. Transition on a note fluttering in the air to the “dies irae dies illa” of the standard requiem by the priests and the women expressing their fear and resignation. Then children come to evoke the cross. And yet Thomas Beckett remains unmoved. He gets into the cathedral and has all doors closed. The chaotic and jesting knights arrive and look for the Archbishop. And he answers identifying himself with Christ. And he is killed. The women do the crying, moaning and mourning. Then the knights come back. And they altogether plead for the king, the state, the nation and accuse the Archbishop of having committed self-murder, “selbstmord”, when unsound in the mind. The same conclusion is in the play but dropped in the film. Yet the knights acknowledge the Archbishop was a great man. The Finale is a chorus with all singers, women and men. A eulogy and request for the martyr. This catholic ending is so trite today. To laud and sing the merits of the martyr and at once ask him a favour, make him our servant, our tool, our interest taking over. It is quite like in the traditional Stabat Mater: now you have cried your eyes out, dear Virgin, you start being useful for us and interceding in our name. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI – L’INCORONARIONE DI POPPEA – GABRIEL GARRIDO This opera is probably the fullest opera by Monteverdi. I am going to emphasize several outstanding points. First the tragic situation in the plot. What is important is the feelings and their expression by all the various actors of this dramatic confrontation. Nero wants to marry Poppea, his mistress, or she has managed 29 to convince him he has to marry her, which is her interest and ambition. Nero has to repudiate his present wife Ottavia but he has to have a reason. So he waits. Out of spite she wants to punish Nero by having his mistress killed. Poppea’s husband, Ottone, is deeply in love with her and he cannot do anything against Nero’s will as long as Poppea is going along and he knows it is no love but only ambition. So his love for her leads him to accepting her decision. But he is also Ottavia’s lover and she asks him or rather requires him to kill Poppea otherwise she will have him tortured to a slow death by Nero on the accusation that he raped her. He yields to the desire out of fear as much as spite, or maybe a desire to get even with Poppea: he looks and sounds as the only one who does not really know what he wants to do. But he is loved by Drusilla, a simple woman who lends him her clothes as a disguise to approach Poppea and kill her, on her demand, she thinks, because she wants him for herself alone. So Ottone tries to do it but Poppea is protected by Love and Ottone discovered by the servants. He runs away and Drusilla is arrested due to her clothes that are recognized. Brought to Nero she does not speak and is condemned to a slow painful death, but Ottone appears and tells he did it on the command from the Empress. Nero then exiles his wife he can repudiate easily, pardons and enslaves Drusilla in his own house, lets Ottone free since now he is out of the way, and he can marry Poppea who is crowned at the end of the opera. You must add two side mirror images of the intricacy of the plot. The first is the love affair between the Empress’s page and chambermaid, Valetto and Domigella. It emphasizes how love was a game, or a sport, in that ancient Rome, but a sport in which you could kill your competitors. The second side plot is the death of Senecca, ordered by Nero. It is there to enable you to measure the depth of Nero’s corruption and tyranny. The second admirable aspect of this opera is the use of voices. Poppea’s two lovers are altos, starting thus a long lasting tradition up to Haendel’s operas : altos are the heros, the most important males, as opposed to the sopranos who are the most important women. (We have to remember that in those days altos were in fact castratos who were males and provokingly used in their physical maleness : body and allure.) But Monteverdi’s supreme genius is his use of voices in a dramatic way, hence opposing them one to the other. The most important duet is Nero and Poppea, an alto and a soprano, reaching its topmost realization in act 3, scenes 5 and 8, the latter being the finale of the opera thus giving to this duet the upmost and outstanding importance it deserves. The second remarkable use of voices is the trio of familiars accompanying Senecca to death with three male voices, an alto, a tenor and a bass in act 2, scene 3. Absolutely amazing and perfect because the three voices have the male harmonics and yet they cover a tremendous range emphasized by the contrasting tools Monteverdi uses. I will quote also the duet Nero and Lucano, an alto and a tenor, in act 2, scene. Let me say that Monteverdi’s use of voices is emphasizing their flexibility as for expressing feelings and emotions, and this time the feelings and expressivity may vary through the opera and not one feeling be associated to one voice permanently : a great improvement in operatic production. Last and not least, Monteverdi gets rid of the old style by associating it musically to Senecca who also represents the respect of moral rules against any feelings, passions or emotions like love or hatred. He sings the way he thinks, in an old mould and he is sentenced to death, and in the old socratic tradition accepts to die. Beautiful death, burrying and funeral service and oration for the old style that is thus declared dead, but only with musical means. All that makes this opera one of the most perfect of this new era of operatic writing and composing. th Nothing to do with older forms, like the Ludus Danielis of the 13 century. The show has gone on. A new era has risen. We can though wonder what it represents in the ideological set-up of the time. It goes to pagan models, to old Roman, widely pre-christian anecdotes, centers on passions and their killing dimension, when necessary. It is immoral, unethical, irreverential, openly antireligious. Nothing can save man or woman, except her or his passions and blind feelings. But that is the birth of a new world in which the individual can act independently of social rules. A new world really or the resurgence of an old world ? That is the debate that must have run deep in the society of the time : can we accept the fact that the earth is round and it turns around the sun just because it is so, or must we keep our sacred religious beliefs, the word of God himself ? Dr Jacques COULARDEAU Probablement l’opéra le plus achevé de Monteverdi. D’abord l’intrigue tragique. L’important ce sont les sentiments et leur expression par les divers acteurs de cette confrontation dramatique. Néron veut 30 épouser Poppée, sa maîtresse, ou elle l’a persuadé qu’il devait l’épouser, ce qui est son ambition et intérêt à elle. Néron doit répudier sa présente femme Ottavie mais il lui faut une raison. Aussi il attend. Par dépit elle veut punir Néron en faisant tuer sa maîtresse. Le mari de Poppée, Otton, est profondément amoureux d’elle mais ne peut rien faire contre la volonté de Néron tant que Poppée l’accepte, et il sait que ce n’est pas de l’amour mais de l’ambition. Mais il est aussi l’amant d’Ottavie et elle lui demande ou plutôt exige qu’il tue Poppée sous peine de sa mort à petit feu sur sa dénonciation pour viol. Il accepte par peur autant que dépit ou peut-être le désir de se venger de Poppée : Il semble être le seul à ne pas savoir ce qu’il veut. Mais il est aimé par Drusilla, une simple femme qui lui prête ses vêtements pour s’approcher de Poppée qu’elle lui demande naïvement de tuer pour qu’il soit à elle seule. Otton essaie donc de tuer Poppée qui est protégée par l’Amour et il est découvert par les serviteurs. Il s’enfuit. Drusilla est arrêtée, trahie par les vêtements qui sont reconnus. Elle ne dit rien à Néron qui la condamne à une mort atroce. Mais Otton apparaît et dit que c’est lui qui a tenté d’assassiner Poppée sur l’ordre de l’Impératrice. Néron exile sa femme qu’il peut aisément répudier, gracie et met à son service Drusilla et relâche Otton maintenant qu’il est écarté. Il peut épouser Poppée qui est couronnée à la fin de l’opéra. Absolument racinien avant l’âge. Ajoutez deux intrigues annexes pour compliquer le tout. D’abord la liaison entre le page et la chambrière de l’Impératrice, Valetto et Domigella. Cela renforce le fait que l’amour était un jeu, ou un sport, dans la Rome antique, un sport où l’on pouvait tuer ses rivaux. Ensuite la mort de Sénèque ordonnée par Néron. Cela renforce la vision de la corruption et de la tyrannie de Néron. Le second aspect admirable de cet opéra est l’utilisation des voix. Les deux amants de Poppée sont des altos, lançant ainsi une longue tradition jusqu’aux opéras de Haendel : les altos sont les héros, en opposition aux sopranos qui sont les héroïnes. (Souvenons-nous qu’en ce temps-là les altos étaient des castratos, et donc des mâles utilisés de façon provocante dans leur masculinité physique.) Mais le génie suprême de Monteverdi est d’utiliser les voix dramatiquement en les opposant les unes aux autres. Le duo principal est Néron et Poppée, un alto et une soprano, atteignant la perfection dans l’acte 3, scènes 5 et 8, la dernière étant le final ce qui donne à ce duo l’importance capitale qu’il mérite. La deuxième utilisation remarquable des voix est le trio des Familiers de Sénèque au moment de sa mort avec trois voix masculines, un alto, un ténor et une basse, acte 2, scène 3. Fascinante et parfaite car les trois voix ont les harmoniques masculines mais couvrent une étendue vocale renforcée par les moyens musicaux de Monteverdi. Signalons encore Néron et Lucain, un alto et un ténor, acte 2, scène 6. L’utilisation des voix par Monteverdi renforce leur flexibilité pour exprimer des sentiments, des émotions, et ici les sentiments et l’expressivité varient dans l’opéra et un sentiment n’est pas identifié à une voix. Voilà un grand progrès dans la technique vocale de l’opéra. Finalement Monteverdi liquide le vieux style en l’associant musicalement à Sénèque qui représente aussi le respect des lois morales contre les sentiments, passions et émotions comme amour et haine. Il chante comme il pense, dans un vieux moule et il est condamné à mort et il accepte socratiquement de mourir. Beauté tout à la fois d’une mort, mise au tombeau et oraison funèbre pour le vieux style ainsi déclaré forclos, et seulement avec des moyens musicaux. Cela fait de cet opéra une illustration parfaite des écriture ème et composition nouvelles. Rien à voir avec les formes plus anciennes, le Ludus Danielis du 13 siècle par exemple. La vie a continué. Une nouvelle ère est née. Mais demandons-nous cependant ce qu’il représente idéologiquement à son époque. Il retrouve les modèles païens, des fables romaines pré-chrétiennes, se centre sur les passions et leur dimension assassine, si nécessaire. Il est immoral, irrévérencieux, ouvertement antireligieux. Rien ne peut sauver l’homme ou la femme, sauf passions et désirs aveugles. C’est là la naissance d’un monde nouveau dans lequel l’individu peut agir indépendamment des règles sociales. Un nouveau monde vraiment ou la résurgence d’un monde ancien ? C’est le débat qui devait parcourir la société de l’époque : devrions-nous accepter que la terre fût ronde et le soleil tournât autour d’elle seulement parce que c’est ainsi, ou ne devrions-nous pas en rester à des croyances religieuses sacrées, la parole de Dieu luimême. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU HERVÉ NIQUET – HENRY PURCELLE – KING ARTHUR 31 King Arthur is a crazy rewriting of English history after the English revolutions to give some kind of a national identity to that United Kingdom that was nothing but the result of successive invasions and constant European strife. Just that is funny today, but that is Dryden’s play and we will be deprived of it. We’ll just have the musical intermezzi by Henry Purcell. This composer is the typical and main composer of the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution. The theaters were reopened and censorship was going down quite a lot. They will even invent the copyright a couple of decades later. But the play and the subject were not funny at the time. It was dead serious and no one was supposed to laugh at this new version of English history. The Celtic past of England is laughable when we know they were once and for all dominated and colonized by Julius Caesar and that will not change with the invasions of the Angles, the Jutes and the Saxons, and “marginally” the Danes, and of course not with the invasion of the Normans. The Celtic language will only survive in the Welsh mountains. To evoke the Bretons as the ancestors of the modern Britishers is a fable and a farce. But to that very long play by Dryden, that so serious subject at the time, Henry Purcell gave some dynamism and some fun. The musical interludes and intermezzi are first of all distractions, entertainments. Niquet with the help of two buffoons, I was going to write baboons, Corinne and Gilles Benizio, turns those musical pieces into a real farce by reinventing some kind of funny dramatic line among them, and the line is what happens to a poor stage manager when he is invaded by a band of lurid en lubricious singers. A few extras are added in front of the curtain just for our pleasure. Niquet goes one iota further by turning the musical pieces into some kind of big feast, more of an orgy actually with two perverted monks and a barbecue. This production is a farce and wants to be a farce. That does not serve the music by Purcell badly, wrongly or well. Purcell’s music can be served with any sauce you want, it remains Purcell’s music but it makes the whole show so much more like what it probably was: a celebration of dramatic freedom and of dramatic entertainment in those troubled years of the end of th the 17 century, after they had nearly been re-colonized by the French of Louis XIV. They will remain Germanic, or Anglo-Saxon if you prefer, for ever. Enjoy the farce. Enjoy the music. Enjoy the show and don’t forget the show must go on… go on living not being a putrefied and petrified baroque classic, which it is by the way, but let us de-petrify that composer a little. The question is to know whether Niquet went too far. For me he had a black-out moment at the right time though it would have been funny to see King Arthur in his underwear or even in his under-underwear. But well, I guess the opera in Montpellier is not the Moulin Rouge. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU Certains confondent Purcell et Haendel, deux compositeurs baroques anglais qui ont fait dans le semi-opéra, l’oratorio, l’opéra, etc. De Purcell on connaît plus les fanfares tamisées pour festivités sur la rivière boueuse de Londres qu’autre chose. C’est donc avec plaisir que l’on nous ressort King Arthur, même s’il faut aller à Montpellier pour avoir cette résurrection, bien que je me souviens d’une à La Chaise Dieu avec Paul McCreesh. Mais la musique n’est qu’une suite d’intermèdes et de petites chansons qui coupaient une pièce fleuve de Dryden. C’était les moments de relaxation mentale et de divertissement auditif pour le pauvre public londonien. Mais Purcell c’est aussi le musicien de la Restauration et de la Révolution Glorieuse, c'est-à-dire de la fin de l’ère puritaine anglaise, de la réouverture des théâtres, d’une certaine liberté retrouvée qui se couronnera quelques années plus tard par l’invention du copyright qui donne tout contrôle, toute liberté et toute responsabilité à l’auteur. Vous pouvez imaginer la fête que c’était en ce temps là. Mais il fallait se reconstruire une identité nationale. Alors on invente les « Bretons » bien que depuis Jules César l’Angleterre ait toujours été une terre colonisée, par les Angles, les Saxons, les Jutes, les danois, les Normands, et avec la Restauration de 1860 par les Français de Louis XIV. Le passé Celtes de l’Angleterre était depuis longtemps oublié et avait été refoulé dans les montagnes du Pays de Galles. Mais qu’importe ! Voilà une légitimité historique évidente pour la nouvelle Grande Bretagne. Et on fait la fête sur cela en faisant que ces Celtes du Roi Arthur battent les AngloSaxons. Là vous pouvez rire. Mais en ce temps là c’était sérieux et Purcell était là pour faire passer la pilule historique avec une bonne musique entraînante et gentiment grivoise. Niquet ne va qu’un petit cran plus haut et invente les aventures d’un régisseur de scène envahi par ces bateleurs de chanteurs et de danseurs. Ils en rajoutent un peu en devant de rideau, bref ils se font plaisir et ils nous font plaisir. Ils transforment les festivités de la victoire en une véritable orgie avec barbecue et ils inventent – heureusement – une panne de lumière quand le Roi Arthur allait quitter son pantalon. Dommage 32 il semblait plutôt alléchant. Mais il faut savoir ne pas aller trop loin j’imagine, comme Mesguich disait à ses étudiants. Il est vrai aussi que la comédie de Montpellier n’est pas les Folies Bergères ou le Crazy Horse. Alors le classique baroque que nous avons fait de Purcell se retourne dans sa tombe mais Purcell lui-même est définitivement pris d’une sensation très forte de plaisir dans la Westminster Abbey où il doit trôner, à part qu’ils l’aient déplacé pour faire place aux Sex Pistols. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU GABRIEL GARRIDO – MONTEVERDI – LA FAVOLA D’ORFEO Monteverdi surprend dans cette fable par les thématiques païennes christianisées ou plutôt diabolisées. C’est l’amour qui est chanté de bout en bout dans cet opéra, l’amour d’Orphée pour Eurydice, l’amour chanté par les bergers et les nymphes, Orphée étant posé d’emblée comme un demi-dieu. L’amour est ici saisi dans ses deux dimensions humaines, amour passionnel et amour charnel, mais sans la dimension chrétienne qu’on pourrait attendre dans la tradition du Moyen Âge. Pourtant la musique est tout à fait dans cette tradition revue et corrigée par Monteverdi. Il suffit d’entendre le prologue pour savoir que la musique est bien héritière de la tradition, tout en la dépassant, un prologue tout à la gloire de la musique et de son pouvoir. Le style nouveau fait que la force de la musique vient d’elle-même, de son harmonie et de sa beauté, et cela est en continuité avec la tradition qui pose la musique comme outil de beauté, mais en rupture aussi car la beauté n’est pas d’origine divine mais purement interne. De la même façon Monteverdi allie la musique savante d’origine sacrée à la musique populaire beaucoup plus légère, endiablée, dansante, comme par exemple dans le chœur des nymphes et des bergers, plage 4 de l’acte I, tout à fait dans la tradition à nouveau du Ludus Dianelis ou d’Adam de La Halle. Ce qui met cela en rupture c’est l’utilisation dramatique de ces styles pour construire le drame et la tragédie. L’amour couronné par l’hyménée sera puni d’une morsure de serpent qui tuera Eurydice et l’enverra en enfer pour le châtiment éternel qu’elle ne peut mériter que par sa dimension païenne. On se souviendra que le serpent d’airain est une punition de Dieu à son peuple d’Israël pendant l’exode. Mais ici il n’y a pas le remède de Moïse. On remarquera aussi comment le serpent attaque la femme dans la plus pure tradition d’Eve. C’est alors qu’Orphée va charmer l’Enfer et passer le portail qui porte l’inscription rendue célèbre par Dante et ensuite le fleuve avant l’enfer lui-même. Par son chant, ses plaintes, ses prières il réussira à adoucir le cœur des esprits et du diable lui-même qui relâchera sa proie Eurydice, mais la condition est draconienne : ne pas se retourner de tout le voyage de remontée des enfers, ce qu’Orphée, par inquiétude d’amour, ne sera pas capable de respecter. Et se retournant pour vérifier qu’Eurydice le suit bien, il la condamnera à l’enfer pour toujours. Et il ne pourra se pardonner son crime, après la tentation d’en finir lui-même pour rejoindre Eurydice en enfer, que sur l’intervention d’Apollon qui lui démontre la supériorité du ciel, et donc de la dimension divine de l’amour, et par-là même de la musique qui chante ce ciel, cette dimension divine de la vie. La fable est charmante. Le discours christianisant est tendre et délicat. La musique est capable de faire danser mille serpents d’airain. Les voix sont dans cet enregistrement plus justes que justes et plus profondes que tous les fleuves infernaux. Un accent fort est mis sur la modernité de cette musique sans effacer les racines dans la tradition, ou plutôt les traditions anciennes. On mesure alors la force de cette Renaissance, de ces temps baroques commençant ainsi en Italie, avec pourtant des antécédents français, flamands et anglais avant d’exploser en Allemagne. C’est la seule possibilité d’inventer un style nouveau, d’ouvrir les portes de la modernité, dans tous les âges de l’humanité : partir de la tradition et la dépasser de l’intérieur même. Monteverdi ne fait que changer l’équilibre précaire atteint dans les siècles précédents tout en déplaçant les thèmes pour redécouvrir les thèmes païens, antiques, ce que même Adam de La Halle n’avait pas osé, chantant l’amour de Marion et de Robin dans le contexte féodal et chrétien. On remarquera cependant que Monteverdi transpose ainsi dans la musique ce que Boccace, Dante et Chaucer, pour ne citer que trois poètes plus anciens, avaient fait en leur temps en poésie, même si l’équilibre global était très chrétien. Ici Monteverdi paganise le chrétien pour mieux diviniser le diabolique. Monteverdi est sur la route de la maturité de l’opéra moderne. 33 Dr Jacques COULARDEAU Monteverdi surprises us in this fable with the christianised or rather satanised pagan themes he uses. Love is sung from beginning to end in this opera, the love of Orpheo for Eurydice, the love that the shepherds and nymphs celebrate, Orpheo being stated from the start as being a demigod. Love is here captured in its two human dimensions, passionate and carnal, but without the christian dimension we could expect in the medieval tradition. Yet the music is quite in this tradition, even if slightly corrected by Monteverdi. Just listen to the prologue to make sure this music is the heir of that tradition, and yet goes beyond it, a prologue that sings the glory and power of music. The new style guarantees that the power of this music comes from itself, its harmony and its beauty, and this continues the tradition that states music is beauty, and yet steps beyond this tradition because beauty is not divine in origin but purely structural. In the same way Monteverdi ties up sophisticated music, sacred in origin, to popular music, a lot lighter, energetic, full of dancing tunes, like for example in the chorus of nymphs and shepherds, track four of the first act, quite in the tradition of the Ludus Danielis and Adam de La Halle. What brings up a break in this filiation is the dramatic use of these styles to build the drama, the tragedy. Love crowned by marriage will be punished by the bite of a snake that will kill Eurydice and send her to hell to be eternally punished, which she can only deserve because of her pagan dimension. We will remember that the bronze serpent is a punishment from God against His people of Israel during the exodus. But here there is no cure from Moses. We can also note that the snake attacks the woman in the most direct filiation to Eve. That’s when Orpheo decides to go and charm hell, crosses the portal carrying the inscription that was made famous by Dante and then the river just before hell. His singing, his moaning and his praying will soften the hearts of the spirits and Satan himself who will free Eurydice, but under tha draconian condition that Orpheo do not look back during the whole trip out of hell. This Orpheo will not be able to do and his loving fear or fearful love will make him turn around to make sure Eurydice is behind him, thus sending her back to eternal damnation. He will only be able to excuse his own crime, even after being tempted to end his own life to be reunited with Eurydice in hell, when Apollo intervenes to demonstrate to him the superiority of heaven, of the divine dimension of life. The fable is thus charming. The christianizing discourse is tender and delicate. The music is able to make thousands of bronze serpents dance. The voices in this recording are absolutely perfect and deeper than all infernal rivers and oceans. A heavy emphasis is put on the modernity of this music without erasing the roots in the tradition, or rather the many traditions of previous centuries. We can then measure the power of this Renaissance, of these baroque times that are being born in Italy, with some antecedents in France, Flanders and England before exploding into full triumph in Germany. It is the only way to invent a new style, to open the gate to modernity, in every age of human history: to start from the tradition and to step beyond from inside. Monteverdi only changes the precarious equilibrium reached in preceding centuries along with his shifting of themes to rediscover pagan and ancient themes, what even Adam de La Halle did not dare to do when he sang the love of Marion for Robin, but within the feudal and christian context. We will nevertheless note that Monteverdi invests into his music what Boccacio, Dante and Chaucer, to only quote three poets from previous centuries, had done in poetry, even if their global balance was very christian. Here Monteverdi paganizes what is Christian to better divinize what is diabolical. Monterverdi is fully on the road to the maturity of modern opera. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU GEORG FRIEDRICH HANDEL – ARNOLD OSTMAN – AGRIPPINA Handel was german originally, so it is quite normal for Arnold Ostman to conduct Agrippina in the best and heaviest German style of thirty years ago. I just wonder what the London Baroque Players are th doing in that boat that is a pure 19 century martial version of this opera. First the three male soprano and altos have been replaced by two tenors and one baritone. That destroys an enormous proportion of Handel’s art. It is bad enough when they use female sopranos where Mozart must have used castratos. But to recompose the work to eliminate the castratos and the musical th range they represented is not a distortion: it is a cultural crime. Apparently that was done in the 19 century 34 for simple enough reasons. But why and how could that be still done in 1983-85 in Germany with the London Baroque Players? Richard Strauss for example managed the problem by using female sopranos for the young boys and young men he wanted on the stage. The Rosenkavalier is a female soprano for one example, which could today be repaired and sung by a male soprano or a male alto. But Richard Strauss did not have any choice in Germany in his time. But it is no longer the case in England or in Germany in the last quarter of the th 20 century. This is an unacceptable mutilation of a work of art that can be performed properly and it could in 1980+. The second remark is the extremely bad quality of the actors for the parts. Nero is 17 when he becomes emperor and his mother is 39. And all the others are in that bracket between 17, or maybe even younger for Poppea, and 35 with one exception: Claudius who was 64 when Nero became emperor. Agrippina is a more than mature woman with a corpulence that has nothing to do with what she was. Ottone is too old and his behaviour is not that of a young man in love, far from it, who is maybe slightly shy and timid in front of the emperor and women. Narciso is in no way the obese character that is put on the stage with his tenor voice instead of that of a male soprano. Claudio in that gallery of people too old for their parts seems to be too young since he is supposed to be 25 years older than Agrippina and he is far from being that on the stage. In Handel’s time they were well obliged to respect these age ranges because life expectancy was not that long, even for opera singers. It would have seemed incredible in Handel’s time to have a singer on a stage that could be over 50 and all singers tio be between 35 and 60. The music is also played with modern instruments and a lot too powerfully and systematically trying to homogenize the various instruments of the orchestra into one single mash, which is definitely going against Handel’s art. The music is too heavy and at times on the verge of umpapa brass band rendition. On the other hand the plot is so well emphasized, cut up and set up that we have no difficulty following the fake letter, the fake succession, the surprise arrival of Claudius, etc. In fact the plot is made too rigid and there is no possible variation or hesitation or blurred situations. That is deadly for characters like Nero who is a childish pubertal capricious little pest, or Ottone who is a shy, hesitant and unsure lover and politician as well as military officer, probably, except if he compensates his shyness in his military occupation by too much authority. And I will not speak of poor Agrippina who is improvising a strategy that runs amok all the time and the pitiful Poppea who is fooling around with any male in sight to the point she nearly got her wings scorched. The costumes were borrowed from David’s paintings of Napoleon I’s imperial fashion with high waistlines for women and all kinds of coats and hats for men. In Handel’s time the opera singers were th dressed in the court fashion of their time not in that 19 century French style. This version of this opera is not worth much and I am surprised it came out at all. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU RICHARD STRAUSS – DER ROSENKAVALIER – PHILIPPE JORDAN – ANNE SCHWANEWLIMS L’ouverture est un petit prodige de dissonance harmonieuse avec quelques morceaux de phrasé que des centaines de films liquoreux et sentimentaux d’Hollywood ou de New York utiliseront, imiteront et plagiariseront jusqu’à plus soif dès l’avènement du cinéma parlant. Mais quel plaisir de savoir ainsi que tout finira bien. La Maréchale ouvre le feu avec son amant, son amour secret, Octavian, dans une atmosphère tendre, intime, triste mais raisonnable et sans illusions. L’âge venant la Maréchale doit se résoudre à laisser partir ce jeune homme de 17 ans avec lequel elle a suffisamment joué, même s’il ne sait pas encore qu’il va partir, tout conte qu’il est et de l’autorité que cela lui donne. La mise en scène est on ne peut plus claire dans cette scène de chambre et de lit, lit qu’on piétine et dans lequel on roule et se roule, comme dans un drame bourgeois. C’est qu’on quitte ici le ème courtois à bout de souffle, même au 18 siècle, pour entrer dans le bourgeois. La dame d’antan pouvait se donner pour une nuit d’amour, et une seule, au chevalier courtois une fois l’épreuve passée. Mais ici le lien du mariage est la sanction et la bénédiction de l’amour, ou en fait fonction si l’amour est absent. C’est pourquoi l’entrée du Baron Ochs sème la panique avec ses exigences 35 de mariage riche avec une jeune fille juste sortie du couvent, Sophie, fille d’un riche bourgeois à la recherche de quelque sceau ancien de noblesse pour sa fille, parce que simplement il est riche. Les miroirs tournants du décor démultiplient l’espace et permettent de changer de lieu, de temps, de vie même peutêtre, certainement de peau d’un instant à un autre, et Octavian en soubrette qui ne sait même pas faire un lit est charmant, surtout qu’il n’est pas un garçon du tout. C’est là que commencent des sous-entendus sur la Vienne décadente de Strauss, mais qui n’ont plus sens aujourd’hui. Aujourd’hui les clins d’œil n’ont nécessairement pas la même valeur. Et l’acte se terminera avec Octavian Chevalier à la Rose et un caprice d’adolescent mal vieilli qui veut et exige, heureusement sans obtenir ce que la Maréchale lui a probablement trop souvent promis sinon même peutêtre gentiment donné. Il a le culot de son âge, mais aussi l’insolence et une terrible vision amoureuse en forme de tunnel mono directionnel. Heureusement vient le deuxième acte où il va découvrir Sophie et lui faire la cour pour le Baron, Ochs, qui d’ailleurs est loin d’être aussi bovin qu’il aurait du être, et cela est un peu dommage. Mais Sophie comme Octavian se prennent au jeu et tombent follement amoureux au point d’en avoir un duel avec Ochs, pour Octavian, et une crise de rébellion pour Sophie qui refuse d’épouser ce Baron grossier et veut s’enfuir avec ce beau jeune homme, qui est une femme, hélas. Et à nouveau cette ambiguïté aujourd’hui irritante s’insinue et spolie, qu’on le veuille ou non, un peu la vision, en fait l’audition, car une voix de femme n’est pas une voix d’homme, même sur une scène et bien déguisée. Je n’aime pas ces conventions disons-le franchement alambiquées. Mais le spectacle doit continuer. Ah ! Le Mamzelle de la découverte ! Ah ! le tonitruant bourgeois parvenu de Faminal ! Et on finit le tout sur un air de valse qui tourne comme le décor et n’en finit pas de nous étourdir de qui est qui, de quoi est quoi, et d’où est où. C’est alors qu’on aimerait ne pas avoir un entracte interminable pour pouvoir directement passer au troisième acte et à son long mime d’ouverture qui permet de mettre en place le décor du piège et la fausse femme de chambre devient franchement un travelo, alors qu’elle est à vrai dire une femme déguisée en homme déguisée en femme, soulignant alors le trait d’une insinuation qui a du avoir été risible, peut-être, en son temps, mais qui ne l’est que fort modérément aujourd’hui, sinon de condescendance devant ce truc en définitive très peu gay-friendly. Le Kein Wein est alors amusant, mais d’un sourire jaune. Cet acte sombre brillamment dans une tempête mélodramatique avec chœurs d’enfants et chasse poursuite dans laquelle le Baron Ochs est accusé de bigamie, d’être un époux indigne et un père dégénéré. En d’autres termes il porte bien son nom dans un sens bien que mal dans un autre. Le traquenard se referme avec espions dans les placards, sous les tables et dans des trappes. On n’oubliera pas le Commissaire à la dégaine de Colombo. Et bien sûr on finit avec l’amour en unisson frémissant puis totalement avachissant à même le sol comme à Hollywood à nouveau, et dans la même pudeur, la Maréchale dominant, répartissant et unissant les rôles et les visées. Mais ce final prend un air étonnant avec la mezzo-soprano dans le rôle du beau jeune homme. Final de trois femmes d’où le mâle est exclu. Plus que surprenant de chanter « si je n’étais pas un homme » quand on est une femme avec une voix de femme. Le monde d’unité et de paix finale devient alors comme l’antidote des mots de ce final, un antidote qui détruit le sens de l’amour puisqu’il ne mène qu’à une impasse qui détruit tout avenir. On ne régénère pas l’amour mis à mal par Faminal ou Ochs. On le dévoie sur une voie de garage. Dommage car la musique n’est certes pas conventionnelle. Une dernière remarque sur le même thème. Mohamed est supposé être noir. Il ne dit rien. Il n’est qu’une décoration exotique dont le sens est justement dans la simple sémiologie des images visuelles qu’il porte. Le vêtir en clown blanc, pourquoi pas. Mais que le danseur soit blanc ne se justifie en rien, qui plus est avec un masque noir, cela revient à en faire un « Black Minstrel » américain à la longue tradition raciste. La présence d’un noir bien gérée aurait pu dépasser l’anecdote colonialiste de Strauss. En d’autres termes la mise en scène très créative trouve des limites certaines dans la gestion des rôles. Le Rosenkavalier devrait aujourd’hui être un homme comme dans la longue tradition qui va du Néron (et autres) de Monteverdi au David (et autres) de Haendel, non pas trahissant mais corrigeant Strauss et le faisant ème sortir de son tabernacle fin du 19 siècle. De même le petit serviteur musulman noir n’aurait pas du être tourné en un charmant mais ridicule car vidé de sens Black Minstrel. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU 36 RICHARD STRAUSS – SALOME – SIR GEORG SOLTI No overture. Straight into the first scene. The Jews are rowdy in the back. John the Baptist is the cause of it. He is preaching from the cistern where he is kept a prisoner. It is forbidden to look at him or have any contact with him. But Salome comes and she wants to see him, speak to him. She goes down into the cistern and finally forces the soldiers to bring John out. The music replaces words. A volcanic eruption of dark and particularly strong sounds that are chaotic in their organization to lead to a cool moment of violins that evoke the sanctity of the man coming out of the cistern. And the horns introduce John’s first prophecy of the coming of Jesus and of his public death. Then he accuses Salome’s mother of having betrayed her Jewish blood by marrying the king. Salome is mesmerized and starts seeing visions of dark countries and dragons. Then she discovers his body and transmutes it into an ivory statue. John rejects Salome’s eyes and looking. Salome introduces herself. He rejects her, sends her back to the Babylon she represents, to Sodom whose daughter she is. And back to his prophecy about the Son of Man. Salome has fallen into total love and she wants to touch him and asks for permission. John rejects her in the name of Babylon and as a woman who brought evil on earth. Salome then describes John’s body as the nest of all kinds of snakes and scorpions. She shifts her interest to his hair and becomes lyrical in the most powerful tradition of Solomon’s Song of Songs. She begs for his permission to touch his hair. He refuses. Then Salome describes his hair as a crown of thorns and moves to his mouth that she compares to roses and pomegranates, concentrating on its red color. She wants to kiss him. Total rejection. She becomes hysterical. The music and singing are so abysmally chaotic that we have reached the primeval mess before creation. Third prophecy about Jesus in front of whom she should kneel and beg for forgiveness. But she persists in her desire. This time John curses her to damnation and the music takes us down into the innerest circle of hell. A long musical transition to the fourth last and longest scene. Here are Herod and Herodias. Herod reveals himself as very unstable, afraid and dependent on his daughter. She refuses to drink wine, eat a fruit, sit on the throne. John sings his prophecy again. Herod and Herodias have an argument about Herod’s fear in front of John. The Jews enter and assails Herod with a long discussion among them on God, his coming back and what has to be done to escape from his anger, to obey and follow his rule. John brings his prophecy forward again about the Savior of the world. Some Nazarene tells the story of that Savior who is to come to save the world. Herod thinks John and the Nazarene are resuscitating dead people. John amplifies the prophecy with the description of the death of the Savior and all the plagues that will befall the world. Herod wants Salome to dance for him and with John’s voice in the background, he promises her anything she wants. A harsh debate takes place between Herodias who does not want her daughter to dance and Herod who wants her to do so. Herod is losing his mind’s clarity. John’s voice and some more prophecy about Jesus’ passion. Salome finally accepts to dance. The music then is an exotic mixture of various styles from oriental music to Slavonic vast sweeping movements and some western elements including some waltz measures and castanets. It sounds like music from the world where only pleasure, i.e. whimsical desires, reign ahigh. Salome ends at Herod’s feet. She asks for a silver platter and for John’s head on it. Herod refuses and Herodias supports her daughter. Herod must be thinking of the Jews. Herodias wants her vengeance against John who called her a whore. Salome wants to punish John who rejected her. Herod is also afraid of John being moved by God. She refuses anything else. Herod is then convinced something absolutely catastrophic is going to happen. Salome describes the beheading. And there appears the head on a silver platter. She wants to kiss him now and she is disturbed by his closed eyes and his silent tongue. She finds out to possess his body in sexual domination has not been satisfied by the beheading since the voice and the look are gone. She comes to the strange conclusion that love is stronger than the mystery of death. Salome kisses the dead head and finds nothing except the pleasure of having kissed these lips that were refusing her. But at this moment Herod is maybe caught up by one moment of sanity and has Salome killed by the soldiers. This opera is remarkable by the way the subject is treated but also by the strange absolute merging of music and voices. The voices carry a semantic meaning but are integrated in the music as pure sound, they are part of the music and they add a supplementary level of meaning and the meaning becomes part of the music. We reach the highest level of music we can think of when plot and semantic content are also part of the music as 37 music. The harmony of the plot appears fully in the end. The harmony of each piece of text appears fully as part of the blended music and sounds in each scene. And that is a choice. No overture, no real closing piece that is not integrating the voices of the characters, Salome and Herod and the action itself. The last measure is Salome’s death cry. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU GIUSEPPE VERDI – RIGOLETTO STORY Verdi is magical and is able to make something rather banal very dense. This Rigoletto is the very case of such a metamorphosis. A father, a hunchback, has a daughter. We will never know who the mother was. The daughter has been raised and is looked after by some nuns. But churchgoing on Sunday morning is a very dangerous activity in Italy. That’s where and when a young innocent girl can see the nice handsome boy she is going to start dreaming of. Rigoletto the father is a clown in town and he is facilitating the Duke’s conquering of all young females that can move around. As such he is a jester and he attracts the hatred of all fathers, and at the beginning of one in particular who curses him. Verdi hence reverses the Don Giovanni tale. It is the servant who is going to be punished for the philandering of the master. Verdi also changes the tale by making fate the only and sole agent of the fulfillment of this curse. The Duke is going to notice Rigoletto’s daughter at church and especially notice that she has noticed him. Then he will use his courtiers to make her elope, then to abuse her and then to drop her. Rigoletto will hire a hit man of the time to get even with the Duke, but I guess hit men were no longer what they had used to be when called Assassins. He kills the daughter instead of the Duke. The father has paid for the killing of his own daughter. The end is absolutely poignant: the farewell “note” of that poor girl to her father before she dies in his arms. Verdi has completely put a traditional situation completely on its head. First the servant pays for the philanderer (Don Giovanni). Then the daughter dies in the arms of her father, which is quite a twist from Romeo and Juliet or from Goethe’s Werther. The soiled daughter is punished by her being killed in the place of the Duke by the hit man of her own father (think of Margaret in Faust, executed by the German Puritans for fornication in Goethe, executed by the Republic for overdosing her mother with sleeping potion in Berlioz, and executed by the Republic for killing her own child in Gounod). The Duke goes on unscathed (Don Giovanni of course who is punished, but also Faust who escapes but with the magic of his own damnation). But the Italian opera, Verdi’s in particular, is absolutely magical to sing and evoke and recreate love. Love is their real stuff, love and its frustration of course. The love song of Rigoletto to his daughter is the most beautiful love song I know, because it is absolutely not sexual, not founded on desire, impulses, drives etc. It is a pure passion. The pure passion of a father for his daughter with a recollection of her dead mother in her: it is a double love song deeply dressed up in a mourning song. To reach such a love of pure passion has rarely been equaled. Romeo and Juliet are sexual lovers. As lovers their love is pure. But here we are beyond that purity in the virginal power of a father’s love and a daughter’s love. That enables us to see how vain and superficial the love of the Duke for his young and innocent conquests is. The Duke is the rotten enemy but this here moral society punishes the servant by having his daughter killed by a hit man paid by this servant her father. This production of the opera benefits from the fact it was filmed in Siena, on the main square, in a memorable site. The actors had to be wired but it does not show too much with modern technology. A pure moment of musical pleasure and passionate fascination this opera is. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU RACHMANINOV – ALEKO La puissance de l'introduction vient d'une liberté qui se veut plutôt imprévisible avec des solos instrumentaux rupestres, légers, chantants, dansants, et des tuttis orchestraux puissants, et l'inquiétude vient de quelques cymbales, de quelques percussions menaçantes qui introduisent le chœur comme de coutume angélique, dans un premier temps avec les voix hautes des femmes, mais comme minées par les voix sombres des hommes qui s'emballent d'un vaste mouvement tournant, d'un galop dans l'espace. Evocation de la liberté pour sûr mais aussi des dangers de celle-ci. 38 La basse du Vieux Tzigane, qui apparaîtra plus tard comme le père de Zemfira, prend tout de suite un ton nostalgique que le chœur accroît de sa curiosité. La nostalgie du récit est contenu dans certains élans de chant qui reviennent au sol d'un mouvement tout aussi vaste pour n'être plus qu'un récit monotone qui s'envole à nouveau, amplifié par l'orchestre, et pour redescendre sur terre d'un mouvement ample pour n'être plus que triste et au ras de la terre. Aleko violemment lui reproche de ne pas avoir cherché vengeance. Il se fait le défenseur d'une telle vengeance alors que son épouse et un Jeune Tzigane, et même le Vieux Tzigane, protestent mais on sent dans l'intensité des oppositions musicales la jalousie d'Aleko, le poids qu'elle représente pour Zemfira, l'insouciance provocante du Jeune Tzigane et le ton apaisant du Vieux Tzigane. La danse des femmes qui suit est faite toute de douceur, de lenteur, de mouvement souple et enveloppant, rassurant et tendre. La danse des hommes derrière elle est faite de force, de rythmes appuyés, presque guerriers, soutenus par les percussions. Cela devient envoûtant mais aussi inquiétant, menaçant. Il y a comme l'attrait de cette menace, de cet envoûtement. C'est comme une sorte de sorcellerie qui nous prend à son charme, un charme magique, mais l'âme de ces hommes est-elle de la magie noire, certains accords plus cosaques que tziganes semblent évoquer cette dimension. Le chœur rend à la scène la douceur de la nuit et de la lune qui éclaire ce paysage, bien que la musique en arrière se fait lourde et pesante, comme une ombre qui rôde, une ombre qui peut envahir nos esprits, notre territoire, prête à bondir qu'elle est. Le Duettino de Zemfira et du Jeune Tzigane est un entrelacement de voix, de mots, de phrases. Cela fait plus penser à un pas de deux dansé, l'un portant l'autre dans une élévation mutuelle. Et c'est la promesse d'une rencontre au clair de lune, plutôt romantique. Il y a pourtant chez Zemfira une certaine tristesse puisqu'elle est mariée et que cet amour proposé est dangereux. D'autant plus dangereux que Zemfira enchaîne avec la scène du berceau où elle chante le conte du Vieux Tzigane et Aleko intervenant à ce moment là déclare sa lassitude concernant ce chant. Zemfira proteste qu'elle ne chante pas pour lui, qu'elle n'essaie pas de lui plaire. La colère d'Aleko augmente et Zemfira change de ton et devient presque triste quand elle invoque celui qu'elle aime, sans le nommer, jeune, frais et ardent, avec une métaphore des saisons en arrière. Elle se moque sans vrai plaisir. Du dépit? Aleko, de sa voix basse et grave, évoque son sort peu enviable. Il se remémore le passé, ce temps où Zemfira l'aimait et était toute à lui. Et il en arrive dans un chant déchirant à la conviction qu'il l'a perdue. Chant qui tourne sur lui-même comme un mælstrom qui menace d'une fin tragique. Rachmaninov alors prend une sorte de plaisir à nous donner un intermezzo instrumental doux et agréable mais dont les mouvements internes sont autant d'ombres au tableau qui nous entourent et nous cherchent, nous attendent, nous repèrent. Et c'est dans ce contexte un peu glauque que la romance du Jeune Tzigane intervient comme une lumière chaude, brûlante même, et se poursuit dans le duo avec Zemfira. Parfaite union des mouvements et des tons, des tonalités et des sentiments. Mais cela n'a même pas le temps d'être vraiment développé qu'Aleko arrive et découvre la vérité. Zemfira ne cache en rien son amour et cela provoque la violence d'Aleko, dans la voix, dans la musique, dans le geste qui tue le jeune Tzigane. Zemfira pleure alors et provoque Aleko et il la tue pour qu'elle meure dans l'amour du jeune tzigane, comme elle le dit. Le chœur arrive alors sur une musique légère, quasi-insouciante, pour découvrir le malheur du Vieux Tzigane arrivé lui aussi sur ces entrefaites. Zemfira donne son dernier souffle à la révélation de la jalousie qui a tué le Jeune Tzigane et elle-même. Le chœur alors devient funèbre de douceur et le Vieux Tzigane violent de ton et de langage. Une Vieille Tzigane intervient pour organiser l'enterrement des corps tandis que le Vieux Tzigane et le chœur tirent la leçon de ce drame: la liberté des Tziganes, une liberté qui fait qu'aucune loi ne s'applique à eux, ne signifie pas que la jalousie et la vengeance puissent avoir droit de citer dans leur communauté. Bien au contraire. Et ils bannissent l'assassin, l'abandonnant à sa solitude et son remord, s'il en a. Et de remords il n'a point et se contente de regretter sa solitude retrouvée. Une fin abrupte sur ces quelques mots et quelques notes pour clore le drame. Un Roméo et Juliette largement revu et corrigé mais qui se termine là encore avec la mort des deux amants. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU SHOSTAKOVICH – THE NOSE 39 From the very start we are in the kingdom of smells, of the nose. The barber has stinking hands, which is embarrassing for a barber. Right after this short prologue the first scene leads us to discovering a cut nose in the loaf of bread of the barber’s breakfast. He is at once accused of having cut it off the face of a customer. But how can he get rid of it. In the river? He is caught by a policeman and he lies to him but this one is persistent. The music at this moment is very expressive of an oppressive situation from which you can only hope to wiggle out. But wiggling may seem suspicious to a copper. Percussions then are multiplying this paranoid sensation of being a rat in a rat trap. Waking up is difficult for Kovalev and he is led to opening his eyes and finding out, in a mirror that his nose is gone. The gallop to the Police station is quite light and ominous in its music and it becomes the gallop of a whole army, an army of accusations. And we end up in Kazan Cathedral. And he meets his own nose in there, dressed as a state councillor and tries to explain, but fails and the nose escapes. The music is both sombre and seems to be flowing away into the background leaving just some rhythmic pulsating sound as if the poor Kovalev were running scared and impotent in his rat trap. The chase for the nose leads Kovalev to the Chief of Police’s place, but he is gone. So he decides to go to the newspaper office. There the clerk refuses an announcement about a run-away nose because the press would lose all its reputation and credibility. Kovalev is even suggested to go see a doctor. But after seeing the damage the clerk advises finding a journalist who could write an article on the strange functioning of nature and during that conversation he is taking some snuff and stuffs it up his nose. The scene is ending in a completely crazy parade of porters’ announcements that sound like a seesawing dirge, as if they were burying the hope of poor Kovalev about finding his nose again. The musical intermission is just expressing that absurdity of life when everything sounds like barriers, palisades, prison walls and you are reduced to running like a frantic man entirely overwhelmed by the frenzy of the situation. In Kovalev’s apartment we discover Ivan, Kovalev’s valet and a popular song taken from the Brothers Karamazov. And the knocking at the door sounds like some kind of banging by God on the vast drum of the sky. Kovalev, after getting rid of Ivan, enters a long lamentation about his noseless lot. And the music goes on having some light harmonious background on which the singing sounds heavy, rusty, like mourning the death of a whole family, though it is nothing but a missing nose. That very serious music on such a trite subject creates a complete contradiction, a hiatus, an oxymoron in a way that you feel more than see, hear more than think. In the third act, at night, outside the city a crazy situation is created with a coach and its driver and then ten policemen who are supposed to arrest some miscreant and the scene brings on the stage all kinds of people who depict a multifarious and absurd social situation with travellers, and old lady, and the best is of course the bagel seller from the market. She is the one taken away by the cops though she is a completely inoffensive bagel seller. The strident whistle of the cops resounds from time to time and after that pugilistic arrest the nose finally appears on some light notes and then a satirical trumpet that makes fun of these policemen and people. After the fear of Satan expressed by the coppers at the beginning of the scene, this surprise visit of something surrealistic creates disarray and impotence among these guardians of peace and quiet. The policeman brings the nose to Kovalev but he lengthens the presentation of it so that Kovalev becomes anxious about his nose and starts paying and even overpaying the copper, but he is in for a surprise. The nose does not want to go back in its proper place. A doctor is called in but he refuses to do it because it would not be strong enough and he would prefer buying it for his own medical display. Then Kovalev believes it is a vengeance from the staff-officer’s widow who wanted him to marry her daughter. He is suggested to write her a letter and starts when the scene shifts to the widow and her daughter. The letter brought by Ivan tells them the problem but the answer the widow makes reveals she is not to blame. The conclusion is the devil did it. So the hunting of the nose starts again and is quite similar to the hunting of the snark of Lewis Carroll. All kinds of bands of people are brought into the picture to sound as frantic and crazy as possible, gentlemen, dandies, students and even eunuchs. But the nose is still running. Kovalev wakes up in his bed with his nose in place. So it was all a nightmare. He greets the barber who gives him a shave and we are back to the stinking hands of the barber. Let’s go strut on the Nevsky Prospect where Kovalev meets many acquaintances and finally the widow and her daughter and he gives a final answer to her repeated suggestion about marrying her daughter and that final answer is no. 40 The best part about this opera is definitely the music because it is systematically built around musical oxymora that sound even funnier than the story itself, especially when that music is in full contrast with the story. It amplifies the irony and the sarcastic tone. This particular recording from Saint Petersburg is brilliantly explosive and that’s just what we need: a good sneeze every so often to clear up the sinuses of this perambulating nose. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI – IL RITORNO D’ULISSE IN PATRIA – GABRIEL GARRIDO – ENSEMBLE ELYMA This opera by Monteverdi is, after Orfeo, a great step towards modern opera in many ways but it is a lot more than just a great step. We are at once surprised that old harmonics and ways of playing or singing have disappeared. No gregorian heritage any more in this music. We are entering the new style entirely and leaving the old one behind. But it is still a lot more. Orfeo was dealing with a primitive story in many ways : going down into hell to recuperate his love and yet losing her completely out of pure foolishness. That was primitive of Orfeo in many ways not to understand the great privilege he had, primitive and irresponsible. With Ulysses we are entering a completely different world. Love it is for sure, love of Ulysses for his wife Penelope that makes him come back finally, or rather beg and get the permission to go back from the gods, the ruthless and vengeful gods that want to punish humanity for their triteness after having punished Troy for Paris’ vanity. That is a weak argument indeed. These gods are in no way logical. They should be willing to accept the fact that these humans who carried out the gods’ vengeance should be protected and rewarded by these very same and satisfied gods. But gods are never satisfied and always ask for more sacrifices and sacrificial victims. This discourse is not only on ancient pagan gods but it is about the christian God too. God has invented, created some say, a world of justice, peace and love, and yet it is nothing but a constant strifing struggling survival adventure that means victims, death, sacrifices, more victims, etc, to satiate, maybe, God’s thirst for blood, vengeance, violence, as if God could not exist without this constant anger and killing. And yet it goes even farther than that. The love of Ulysses for Penelope and of Penelope for Ulysses is so powerful that no one, not even the gods, can make them change their minds, make them step out of their self-appointed straight path. No one and nothing can disturb their resolution and distort their targeted objective and the path leading to its fulfillment. The whole opera is about this fight of the gods, but also of time, fate and love, that is to say human nature, by definition frail, that is easily tricked and changed by these three evanescent but always present end everlasting temptations or circumstances. This background reinforces the resolution and determination of both Ulysses and Penelope to reach and attain their goal, which is to be reunited in their mutual love. This shows in a way that man, and woman, is more powerful than God if he, or she, wants to be. This is typically Renaissance in a way. And yet Monteverdi is still from his tradtional time. Ulysses will manage to come home. But Penelope will not believe it, believe him. And yet to come to that final possibility, three goddesse will have intervened. Minerva of course, and first of all, but then Juno who is called in to help Minerva, and finally Diana, as the goddess of pure love and purity for women, who is invoked at the very end of the opera, Diana, the triple goddess, this goddess that can represent Hecate, the goddess of death and hell, Semele, the goddess of the moon anbd the night, and Diana herself, the goddess of life, purity, nature, young animals and so many other things, in one word fertility and life. And these three goddesses will have to help bring the gods down from their obstinate blindness or their blind obstinacy : they want to get some kind of vengeance and do not know when and where to stop. That will have to come from Jupiter who will have to convince Neptune. What a long road to salvation ! This divine structure set to work by Monteverdi goes beyond modernity into heritage and beyond heritage into questioning the present and maybe inventing the future. The music and the singing are absolutely remarkable because we no longer have some kind of beautiful musical accompaniment, though it may still be there from time to time. We no longer have a music that is purely the musical embodiment of the drama, though it may still be there from time to time. We reach the level of music becoming the perfect carving of human feelings in the pure marble of the instruments and the voices, the notes and the intervals. The voices are chosen to 41 express these feelings and Penelope for instance will remain, nearly all along, the wailing and lamenting voice of deprived faithfulness. In the same way every voice expresses the feelings of the characters in their very textures and in the music that guides them onto the road of singing. There are so many moments of perfection in that dimension of this opera that we could not even start quoting them all. Music is no longer the voice of God or the song of angels. Music is the exhilarating exploration of the human mind and the human heart. We are opening the door to the most advanced modernity of all times. And I shiver when saying of all times, because at times I feel that Hildegarde von Bingen had maybe reached the same intensity of psychological and spiritual vision. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU Cet opéra de Monteverdi est, après Orféo, un grand pas vers l’opéra moderne de bien des façons mais il est bien plus encore que seulement un grand pas. Nous sommes dès le premier instant surpris que les anciennes harmoniques et façons de jouer ou de chanter aient disparu. Aucun héritage grégorien dans cette musique. Nous entrons dans le style nouveau entièrement laissant l’ancien derrière nous. Et pourtant c’est encore beaucoup plus que cela. Orfeo traitait d’une histoire primitive de bien des façons : descendre aux enfers pour récupérer son amour et pourtant la perdre complètement en remontant et ce par pure négligence. Ce fut vraiment primitif de la part d’Orféo de bien des façons de ne pas comprendre le grand privilège qu’il avait, primitif et irresponsable. Avec Ulysse nous entrons dans un monde complètement différent. Il s’agit bien sûr d’amour, l’amour d’Ulysse pour son épouse Pénélope qui le fait finalement rentrer chez lui, ou plutôt mendier et obtenir la permission de rentrer de la part des dieux, les dieux impitoyables et vengeurs qui veulent punir l’bumanité pour son insignifiance après avoir puni Troie pour la vanité de Paris. C’est là un bien faible argument, pourrait-on dire. Ces dieux ne sont en rien logiques. Ils devraient accepter le fait que ces humains qui ont accompli la vengeance des dieux devraient être protégés et récompensés par ces mêmes dieux une fois satisfaits. Mais les dieux ne sont jamais satisfaits et demandent toujours plus de sacrifices et de victimes sacrificielles. Ce discours ne porte pas seulement sur les dieux païens anciens mais il est porte aussi sur le Dieu chrétien. Dieu a inventé, créé disent certains, un monde de justice, de paix et d’amour, et pourtant ce monde n’est rien d’autre qu’une aventure guerrière et meurtrière de survie qui signifie des victimes, la mort, des sacrifices, encore plus de victimes, etc, pour étancher, peut-être, la soif de Dieu pour le sang, la vengeance, la violence, comme si Dieu ne pouvait pas exister sans cette colère et ces meurtres continuels. Et pourtant l’opéra va encore plus loin. L’amour d’Ulysse pour Pénélope et de Pénélope pour Ulysse est si puissant que personne, pas même les dieux, ne peuvent les faire changer d’idée, les faire quitter la route rectiligne qu’ils se sont fixée. Personne et rien ne peut détourner leur résolution ni déformer leur objectif ni le chemion menant à son accomplissement. L’opéra tout entier concerne la lutte de ces dieux, mais aussi du temps, du destin et de l’amour, c’est à dire de l’humanine nature, par définition frêle et fragile, c’est à dire facilement trompée et modifiée par ces trois tentations et circonstances évanescentes bien que toujours présentes et éternelles. Cet arrière plan renforce la résolution et la déterminantion à la fois d’Ulysse et de Pénélope d’atteindre leur but qui est d’être réunis à nouveau dans leur amour mutuel. Ceci montre d’une certaine façon que l’homme, et la femme, est plus puissant que Dieu si il, ou elle, en décide ainsi. Cela est typiquement renaissance d’une certaine façon. Et pourtant Monteverdi reste de son temps traditionnel. Ulysse réussira à rentrer chez lui. Mais Pénélope ne le croira pas, ni le fait ni lui. Et pourtant pour en arriver là trois déesses auront du intervenir. Minerve bien sûr, et en premier lieu, mais ensuite Junon qui est appelée à la rescousse par Minerve, et finalement Diane, en tant que déesse de l’amour pure et de la virginité de la femme, et qui est invoquée à la toute fin de l’opéra. Diane, la déesse triple, cette déesse qui peut représenter Hécate, la déesse de la mort et de l’enfer, Sémélé, la déesse de la Lune et de la nuit, et Diane elle-même, la déesse de la vie, de la pureté, de la nature, des jeunes animaux et tant d’autres choses, en un mot de la fertilité et de la vie. Et ces trois déesses devront aider à faire descendre les dieux de leur cécité obstinée ou de leur aveugle obstination : ils veulent obtenir une certaine vengeance et ne savent ni quand ni où ils doivent s’arrêter. Cela devra venir de Jupiter qui devra convaincre Neptune. Que voilà une route bien longue vers le salut ! Ce modèle divin mis en marche par Monteverdi va au-delà de la modernité dans le patrimoine et au- 42 delà du patrimoine dans la remise en cause du présent et peut-être l’invention du futur. La musique et le chant sont absolument remarquables car nous n’avons plus un quelconque accompagnement musical, bien que celui-ci puisse ici ou là exister. Nous n’avons plus une musique qui n’est que la matérialisation musicale du drame, bien que celle-ci puisse exister encore ici ou là. Nous atteignons le niveau où la musique devient la sculpture parfaite des sentiments humains dasn le marbre pur des instruments et des voix, des notes et des intervalles. Les voix sont choisies pour qu’elles expriment ces sentiments et Pénélope par exemple restera, presque de bout en bour, la voix de la plainte et de la lamentation de la fidélité insatisfaite. De la même façon chaque voix exprime les sentiments des personnages dans leur textures propres et dans la musique qui les guide sur la voie du chant. Il y a tellement de moments de perfection dans cette dimension de cet opéra que nous ne pourrions même pas commencer à les énumérer tous. La musique n’est plus la voix de Dieu ni le chant des anges. La musique est l’exploration exaltante de l’esprit humain et du cœur de l’homme. Nous ouvrons la porte vers la modernité la plus avancée de tous les temps. Et je frissonne quand je dis de tous les temps, car parfois j’ai l’impression qu’Hildegarde von Bingen avait parfois atteint la même intensité de vision psychologique et spirituelle. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU PHILIPPE JORDAN – DAVID McVICAR – RICHARD STRAUSS – SALOME Strauss’s Salome is a purified vision of Wilde’s. Strauss in 1915 reduced the depicting of the Jews to maybe appear less antisemite than the original and close that episode on a positive vision of Jesus. But Strauss also eliminated in the first scene the discussion of the soldiers about the cistern and the fate of Salome’s mother’s first husband, Herod’s brother and though unmentioned Salome’s father. By doing so Strauss moves to a purer structure more contained in itself and owes less to Salome’s past. We all know about the relationship between Herod and Salome and it becomes an ellipse here. But Wilde deemed it necessary to specify these details and particularly the horror of that death, Salome’s father kept twelve years in this cistern and strangled at the end. Wilde was thus differentiating Salome from Hamlet, which Strauss does not need to do since he speaks to a German audience. Apart from that Strauss is faithful to the play. His music is a tremendous enriching medium added to the text and Strauss systematically uses all his art to multiply the rhythm of the text and the symbolism of that rhythm basically constructed by Wilde around a ternary structure that could sound Christian, but is extended to four (the crucifixion), to five (some diabolic vision), to six (Salomon’s number) and to nine (the very symbol of the devilish beast). The famous kissing scene at the very end is entirely built on such rhythms in the text directly borrowed from Wilde and amplified by the music that adds some extra similar variations. For Wilde it meant they are all the same, put all the moralists in one bag and drown them. They are the devil, including John the Baptist. In Strauss we can be divided as for interpreting that heavy reference to the devil as the step beyond Solomon’s number, beyond the Jewish reference and the Christian presence. That’s where David McVicar, the stage director of the Covent Garden 2008 production, is essential. He explains in the DVD’s bonuses he visually referred to Pasolini’s adaptation of de Sade’s Salo and that it meant he placed his production of Salome in 1938 and the very core of the tale was the problem of alliances with the worst criminals to save one’s privileges. McVicar alludes there to Munich. First we may find it anachronistic for both Wilde and Strauss who lived and produced their play and opera a long time before 1938. But it may be justified since we can see in Wilde’s play a metaphor of what he thinks the world is leading to: a severe catastrophe because of the total inhumanity of its ethics. But yet it is anachronistic. But why have anything against it after all? Does it bring anything new or a supplementary layer of meaning? Some elements do, some don’t. His vertical vision with the banquet upstairs and the turning of the terrace into a cellar with the servants and the guards, and deeper still underground the cistern or prison with John the Baptist is a good idea because the voice of the prophet comes from deep under and travels even higher, to the higher strata of society his prediction menaces directly: they are Babylon. It thus reinforces the discourse about this apocalypse that will come after the Son of Man has been sacrificed. On the other hand the presence of two nude women down in the cellar adds nothing though to the meaning and is a purely gratuitous allusion to Pasolini’s Salo. On the other hand the fact that the executioner will go down into the cistern to behead John the Baptist in complete nudity is justified by the fact he comes back covered with blood and the fact that he will kill Salome at the end in a sexual embrace that reminds us 43 of the sexual embrace Salome gratified him when he came with the head. For Salome her sexual appeal to John is in fact a sexual appeal to death. To die is to have sex with life in a way. Yet it reduces Wilde’s discourse slightly for whom having John killed is the utter unbalancing vengeance human society is based on and leads to insanity and the apocalypse. Here the death of John is nothing else but the satisfaction of sexual lust, though it is partly that in Wilde, and it must be admitted the soprano Nadja Michael is absolutely superb in that rendering. But then her insanity comes from her mixing up death and life, and there, in spite of Strauss erasing it, the insanity can be seen as the mixing up of her dead father and John the Baptist, hence her desire for John the Baptist becomes incestuous, hence she has to have the object of her incestuous desire killed to purify herself, and her father her desire has soiled, but then it tricks her into loving a dead object, a dead mouth, and we come back to the kiss that is both to love and to death. That nudity adds something that would have been in phase with Wilde’s original play (though the reference to Salome’s father’s fate is done without Salome being present, but we may think it makes the opera more complex than Strauss may have thought it. Strauss got something out of the play by the main door of cutting it off and McVicar brings it back in through the skylight of his stage direction. This version of the opera is superb but the meaning is made slightly too rich for the text: after all she is in love with, at first eyes, a body and a voice, and then with a body, hair and a mouth. From a rather abstract trinity to a deeply sensual trinity. There is no real mention of any incestuous dimension, in the opera, though McVicar brings it in with beauty and great art. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU VERDI – OTELLO – PLACIDO DOMINGO The story is simple, Shakespearean to the absolute extreme you can imagine. The peace and happiness of Venice is disturbed by the simple fact that a Moor, Othello, is welcomed as a hero after a battle he won in Cyprus. He is married to the daughter of a high ranking family, Desdemona, who is carrying in her own name the fact that she has a very doomed, demonized lot due to this very disruptive situation and love. This creates a rivalry, antagonism with the captain of the fleet, Cassio, and the extreme envy if not hatred from Iago is enough to turn a disruption, a breach of balance into a major catastrophe. A handkerchief and its supposed or alleged circulation will sign the end of Desdemona strangled by Othello, a strangulation that is very strange in this film since she will survive it long enough to expose her murderer and then die peacefully. Iago is then exposed in his treachery, killed by Othello with a spear instead of being tortured to death, and Othello finally kills himself with a dagger and still no blood at all. And balance is found again after the drama, the balance of sorrow, mourning and justice in a way. The play by Shakespeare and this opera reveals a deep racist inspiration. Othello is bringing this drama to Venice because he is a Moor, an Infidel, a Blackman, etc…That theme exists in other plays like “Titus Andronicus” or “The Merchant of Venice”, with an anti-Semite dimension in these latter cases. The common theme is the hatred from a mediocre person who is trying to get even with better people than him by destroying them through some kind of plotting. But this plotting leads to the ultimate ruin of the plotter. We have to look over this dimension, common in Shakespeare’s time, and see the more universal dimension. The man who is successful will inspire jealousy, envy and even greedy hostility. In this case, the object of that envy is Othello’s wife and the game is to make the successful warrior kill his love, which he does out of some jealous lust, some possessive desire. The subsequent drama and the repentance of Othello shows how things are changing in these renaissance years, how women are little by little capturing some individual existence of their own, on the way to freedom, even if it ends up in death altogether. th In fact Shakespeare in his English society is more advanced than Verdi in his 19 century Italy. Shakespeare doubles the point by making Desdemona’s maid the final and lethal accuser of Iago and his lying and conspiring. We have to think of Romeo and Juliet but this latter case is pure love, no conspiration, jealousy or whatever, though the end is the same apart from the poison. A double death in the name of love. Zeffirelli does a pretty good job by creating a rich environment, at times maybe too rich. A slightly leaner production would have probably emphasized the beauty of the music and the singing. Othello as well as Desdemona reach the depth and density the tragedy requires. 44 The cluttered setting de-concentrates our attention, even maybe our interest. The singing and the music require a stylized setting for our eyes not to get lost in the jungle of the visuals, short-circuiting our ears in their enjoyment of their listening. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU JOHN BLOW – VENUS AND ADONIS The Puritans are gone. Good riddance and let's dance and play music and other games that were not particularly appreciated under the Cromwells, father nor son, both Senior and Junior. But it is not because the Stuarts are coming back from exile in France that we have to believe this music is nothing but a copy cat reproduction of French music in Versailles. Actually it has little to do with the precious and even excessively refined if not in a way effeminate and soft-bellied music of Lully. In fact this very piece of music is directly inspired by the dramatic poetry of Shakespeare on the same theme and subject. It is also very close to Purcell's music, with maybe slightly less flexibility and virtuosity. It is more in the line of some official art, since the composer is the composer of the court. But to reduce that music to some kind of allusion to the King and his mistresses and extra-marital daughters is just absurd. Music is by far richer than some hear-say rumors and gossips. But the change is quite important since in the first act it is Adonis who seduces Venus and pushes her a lot into yielding to his desire. That helps us a lot to accept him as a tenor where we would have expected an alto. As a tenor he sounds dominating as compared to Venus, and he is, at least in his words. He second act is quite different. While Adonis goes to the hunt Venus tries to plan the enslaving of Adonis into a constant passion for her. But here Adonis arrives wounded from the hunt, in fact dying. He wishes more love from Venus but his state does not allow any of that and he dies and Venus mourns. There is none of the tragic fate Shakespeare had built in Adonis' refusal to yield to Venus' love. Where is the young teenager who refused to love Venus because he was too young and he wanted to remain virginal for the time when he would be an adult. His purity gave him a power and a force that this mundane and enjoyment-leaning Adonis will never have. So Adonis' death is dramatic but not so much so since he had satisfied his carnal hunger before dying and he dies a man, a satisfied and satiated hungry lover. The music then does not carry the tragic dimension it could have carried. It is dramatic all right. He varies from gay dances to sad moments of mourning and regret. But of course it never reaches the diabolical lightness and fascinating lure Purcell will inject in his Dido and Aeneas. It is brilliantly rendered by René Jacobs who turns some pieces into a Tenebrae, a mourning mass or celebration, a dirge, a death lamentation. That is beautiful, but Charles II must have had a sombre mind to enjoy that kind of “a masque for the entertainment of the King”. Morbid pleasure indeed. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU BENJAMIN BRITTEN – CURLEW RIVER Brilliant Gregorian beginning in the sonority of a medieval church we can imagine Romanesque. And we are transported to an eternal time that has to be out of time. We are introduced to the abandoned and the weak on the side of the road and God lifting them up, giving them some life back. God is with the dejected and rejected. The Curlew River becomes the divide between this world and another more humane world and the Ferryman is the Go-Between that takes you to the other side of your soul. A rite is to be performed for the first anniversary of a burial on the other side of the river, a grave that is a curing place for the sick. The ferryman is going to bring the people to that shrine. The trumpet of the ferryman is like the trumpet of Jericho: crossing the river is like bringing down the wall that hides the unknown. The harp brings the traveler evoking some mermaid, some voyage, from far behind to far ahead, from the remembered to the unknown, then a change occurs and is announced by the music. 45 The mad woman is introduced as crazy and having made people laugh with her raving. Her discourse is incoherent, she asks for passage as well as for passage to be refused to her. The reedy sound at that time shows that uncertainty, more than craziness. She is distracted by the loss of her child she is looking for and she sees and loses at the same time. Her discourse is incongruent and the music plays on these notes going up and then down as if hesitating to follow one way and only one. She explains her son was stolen from her by a stranger and taken east. This dramatic event has made her mind unclear and fuzzy, which is expressed by the last syllable of the first lines going up and then systematically turning down. Is there still some hope? It sounds very bleak, a favorite theme with Benjamin Britten: the child enslaved by some adult that is no relative. He approaches the motif through the deranged mother. Then the ferryman refuses to take her across the Curlew River and demands her to sing in order to entertain people. This rejection of the one who seems warped is surprising and yet common with Benjamin Britten who constantly tries to explore this divide between acceptance and refusal, normal and abnormal. The madwoman starts speaking in a language that is too sophisticated and she starts more or less asking birds a question about the one she loves and if he is still alive. At this moment we feel all the expectancy in her mind, she is both suffering and hoping. The situation then becomes tense because everyone asks the ferryman to take the mad woman till he finally yields since she knows where she wants to go. The superposition and even contrast between voices though they are all men’s voices create a deep dramatic tension. Strangely enough the dividing river is turned into a connection bringing people closer to one another and on the other bank they discover people around a yew. The ferry has brought the west bank people to the east bank people. The music seems to be alternating between a forward movement and a retreat. The explanation given by the ferryman about a boy that came along with a foreigner as his master, and that boy being sick while crossing and then unable to go on, was struck, abandoned by his master, taken care of by locals but he died after telling he was the only son of a dead nobleman and had been kidnapped. He dies and is buried along the way and a yew is planted. People say he is a saint, come, pray and take some earth to cure their sicknesses. They all start praying a Kyrie Eleison of thankful hope for a sad but miraculous event. The music is then very light with some sad beauty, the beauty of the miracle and the sadness of the dead boy. The mad woman is weeping. They come to the shore, punctuated by the drums. The traveler and other people offer prayers to the boy, but the ferryman is pushing them, along with the drums and kettles, to make haste. Then the madwoman realizes the boy must be her son. The music takes the shape of a dirge with long silences between sad sentences and the singing voices are superimposed without being unified, each one pulling in a different direction. The woman starts mourning and wants to see her son again. The music becomes a complex assemblage of whirls and whorls as if taken in a maelstrom of emotions. But the abbot tells her weeping does not help the child whereas a prayer may bring him peace. She yields and gets ready to deliver a prayer, while the toll is ringing on the percussions, persistent and sad. Then the prayer becomes powerful with the superposition of the Traveler and madwoman’s English on the monks’ Latin very Gregorian chant. The alliance of modern music and medieval singing creates a very powerful atmosphere. The flute supports the madwoman with some rather sharp notes. And a very high pitched voice starts singing as if it were the voice of the child praying in his tomb. Then this spiritual voice introduces the spirit himself that comes to the madwoman and transforms her. The spirit brings the good news that the dead will rise again and the singing becomes very pure on a single note like a continuo to gives depth to the sky high and spiritual singing. The conclusion can then go back to the Gregorian chant and Latin. The prediction is finished. The sign from God has been registered and accepted. The progressive building up of the unified medieval chorus really brings the piece to its fulfillment. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU BENJAMIN BRITTEN – PETER GRIMES 46 An opera like this one is surprising in many ways but this is a special BBC production of 1969 and I would like to insist first on the tremendous qualities of this production. The first element is the setting. It is a complete village square surrounded by wooden houses all raised over the ground with outside staircases to go up to the main doors. These raised houses insist on the danger the sea represents when a tidal wave or a storm comes up to the coast. All made of wood. That’s a brilliant idea and yet it is entirely unrealistic. It wants to be out of time and set in a past that could make the th story plausible. That village looks like a pioneering settlement in New England in the 18 century, a puritan settlement in a way where everyone is meddling with the business of others because they are locked away from the world, and their only entertainment is to gossip and accuse the one they don’t like of all abominable crimes. The second is the house of Peter Grimes, or hut if you prefer. It looks like an upturned ship hull, a dream for many seamen who want to live on the earth as if they were on their boats. It is not without recalling some other uses of that concept, and in a way it reminds me of Moby Dick and of the whale which swallowed Jonas. Here the boat is swallowing the seaman even on the earth. The third positive point is the use of crowds. The chorus is not in anyway set aside or gathered in one place. The chorus singers are moving as they were a real crowd and that gives a good illusion of the mass movements of a crowd when they are more or less chasing Peter Grimes. The fourth point is the very clear distinction between the officials of the village and that crowd. They move alone and not along with a mass of people and they are dressed in a slightly different way. The lawyer and mayor for example with his red coat, or Ellen, the widowed school-teacher, with a knitted sweater and a big brooch. There is thus a clear distinction between the important people and the common people, on top of the fact that the former are the soloists. The story is of course what is essential in that opera that is telling us a story. It is a very bleak story. Peter Grimes, a solitary sailor, needs an apprentice and he takes orphans from the workhouse in the next but rather distant city. The profession of fisherman is a very difficult profession with many hazards and we could say it is not a profession for children of let’s say 10. What’s more Peter Grimes seems to be rather rough and careless. In other words his apprentices seem to die by accident in a rather repetitive way. Helped by Ellen at first, he is abandoned by her when she discovers that the new apprentice is being brutalized. One day when trying to run away from the hostile crowd climbing up to his hut, the new apprentice slips and falls off the cliff to his death. Peter Grimes hides away for a couple of days but he has to come back and there a retired captain gives him the only piece of advice that would pacify the village: take tour boat, go out at sea and sink the boat and yourself. And he does it. The story is depicting a brutal world that is not so much so physically, but I would say socially. The people are meddling with their neighbors’ business all the time, creating tension and stress and pushing people to the brink of sanity and causing over-reactions more than anything else. This is perfectly rendered in this production. But there is of course the music and that is also a great element in the opera. The music never ceases and is always dramatic in its movements up and down in the most logical and yet surprising ways. We cannot really know what is coming and the notes are thus separated one from the others as if the strings of notes were in fact successions of unlinked notes. This creates in the solos a strange feeling of distance, of something lurking in-between the notes, something menacing us constantly. That tone and atmosphere finds its acme with the choruses. The various chorus-singers sing together but most of the times along lines and patterns that are crisscrossing one another to give that impression of a hostile crowd no one can stop or dominate. There is one exception to that disorder. It is the early duet of Ellen Orford and Peter Grimes when they plan some kind of common future with the new child to come. The sentences are perfectly superimposed one onto the other with only the pronouns changing. The contrast between this messy and meddling crowd as long as Peter Grimes is alive and the sudden total ignorance and forgetfulness once he is gone, meaning dead, is of course striking thanks to that use of the music to build a dangerous and menacing environment. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU BENJAMIN BRITTEN – PETER PEARS – BILLY BUDD 47 The re-mastering of the original BBC production of this opera by Benjamin Britten is a real treat with Peter Pears. The story, adapted from Melville by E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier is a fascinating tale about the evilness of human justice on a ship under the Acts of War and other regulations having to do with courtmartialing anyone for any misdemeanor in war time on a man-of-war. Falsely accused by his superior officer, the foundling and volunteer in the royal service against the French in 1797 Billy Budd is unable to defend himself with words because he is silenced by a fit of stuttering. So he hits the accuser and kills him. But that accuser is his superior officer, hence he deserves death for hitting his superior officer and committing murder. He has to be hanged twice but they will reduce it to once. The point is not that miscarriage of justice, but the all-male environment that creates tensions and stress. The said superior officer is “down on” Billy Budd, in other words attracted by him sexually, which he cannot accept and hence he decides to have him pay for that unmanly attraction of his. But Billy Budd is liked by everyone and the captain is himself attracted to that young and handsome foundling. This time we cannot say the attraction is sexual but the attraction is a deep emotion that makes the captain like Billy Budd and vice versa Billy Budd like the captain. In an all-male environment all kinds of distortions can occur in the relationships among the men in this closed environment that the ship is. But that’s not what Benjamin Britten tries to show. He tries to show the dilemma in which the captain was when the events took place. He had to stick to what he had seen and avoid what he may have sensed or felt at the time. He then stuck to his testimony that meant two death penalties. But in his old age, that captain acknowledges the idea that he could have saved Billy Budd because he had the power to pardon the convicted man, and even before he could have testified about the loyalty of Billy Budd, hence the accidental and provoked assault on Billy Budd’s superior officer. But he didn’t and thus he is to be tried by another court, a divine court in which he believes. But the following episode is the main moment of that story. Just before being hanged and released to the deep sea, Billy Budd actually forgives the captain and that saves the captain’s soul, but then he could have pardoned on the spot and he did not do it, and that does not save his soul. That’s the story of a sea episode in which a captain endorses a miscarriage of justice just to keep his liking for the accused secret in an all-male environment. It is very similar to Peter Grimes, except that in Peter Grimes the young apprentices die due to accidents, and yet a retired captain tells Peter Grimes to go at sea and sink himself in his boat and he does it. Miscarriage of justice again. But it is an opera, so what is so musical in this story. The music and the singing are systematically dramatic and somber like hell. Instruments often run one against the others, creating conflictual points even at times hiatuses and that gives to the words and the images since it is a visual show a tremendous depth. But there are some moments when this depth becomes a tremendous elevation. Before his execution Billy Budd is visited by an older sailor who brings him a final drink and a biscuit. That scene is full of emotion and Billy Budd concludes his making his peace with the whole world and the injustice he is going to suffer with a final sentence that reads like that when sung: “That’s all, all, all, and that’s enough, that’s enough, that’s enough. This is a marvelous direct allusion to Solomon’s trial or wisdom (due to the two repetitive triplets in the sentence) but it shows that the captain was the one who was confronted to a decision that could be compared to Solomon’s decision: Billy Budd is guilty twice and he is going to die, but this time the captain did not react like the real mother did, accepting to lose her child for it to live, the captain did not accept to make public his liking for Billy Budd in order to enable him to live. And that’s what is wrong with human justice: it is blind, deaf and mute: it does not see, does not hear and does not say the truth. The music that accompanies the gathering of all the men and the arrival of Billy Budd for his execution is a real gem and diamond in the whole opera with rolling drums from time to time, with whining horns and mocking flutes that create a fake environment to introduce a fake sham of justice that is a real execution nevertheless. And the forgiving declaration of Billy Budd after the reading of the sentence “Captain Vere, God Bless you” shines like a dawning sun in that visual scene of an execution you never see except through the eyes and movements of those who look at it. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU 48