Léone, Structure and Lyricism
by Jean-Christophe Thomas |imed_9632-0001|
The only way to write about Philippe Mion’s
Léone is to remain “on one’s guard” — and guard
against waxing lyrical about a work that is lyrical in every sense of the
word.
Generally speaking, opera as a genre, is a complicated business: no one
really seems to know whether it is primarily music or theater. And to hear
composers tell it, it is not music that dominates. They, at least the best of
them, see music as “the humble servant of a dream.” The transparency of
music, the way in which it serves drama, in a word, its subservience, are
paradoxically the moving forces of its triumph; its deference guarantees the
success of the genre.
Composers are clearly a generous lot, agreeing as they do to share
everything with their librettist: glory, royalties, fame, power, even women
sometimes (Debussy/Maeterlinck). And it is moreover the modern composer who most
aspires to such virtuous self-effacement (modernism does mean the abolition
of privileges!), and who would avoid calling attention to himself with a
particular melody or some monolith of “pure music”… which would interrupt the
flow of the human, all too human drama. All this goes back to Wagner.
And goes right up to Mion. An acousmatic opera:
is this an even more semiotically twisted approach? Not really. To my mind,
this one follows in the same line. After all, Wagner’s orchestra had already been moved beneath the stage.
Here, the lyrical line that emerges from the loudspeakers (which is to say
from everywhere and from nowhere visible) is like a melodio continuo:
ductile, shimmering, harmonic… It stimulates the music of live orchestra.
Very little of it is sound intense, it is rather musical matter whose essence
is luminous or lusterless, polyphonic, filled with moaning, machine-altered
voices; it belongs to the world of liquidity, of subterranean plains, and of
the underlying.
How can music so smooth coexist with so crude a tale of daily life, with
such a seamy story, with a book that so cleverly incorporates sordid little
GEMS of the vernacular? For in spite of the tenderness of its
humor — which fits nicely with burlesque — Léone is
clearly a horrible, harrowing tale. Wozzeck, in
comparison, is kid’s stuff. And in spite of its angelic character (although
the angel here is often rubbed the wrong way and gets a little roughed-up in
the process; it’s an angel that has been jolted and ruffled and who has
learned a thing or two, a “modern” angel, right out of a Wim Wenders film), the musical matter becomes infused with the
drama, like some vulnerable ghost, like the Invisible Man filling up
with black ink. Pity — one of the key elements of Tragedy — seeps in
increasingly, bringing the heart of this desperately, constantly
compassionate music to pound ever more heavily.
In other words, in more structuralist (Barthesian) terms, (and this is
where one must be on one’s guard), we can divide this opera into two
paradigmatic categories: Layer and Rhythm; or if you prefer Smooth and Rough,
or Sublime and Trivial. At each of its level — from the diaphanous level of
“pure music” to the level of the most vulgar of stage directions — one finds
the presence of each of these two models, or imprints, or forms. And I
believe that this morphological composition — which serves to reconcile the
horrid and the splendrous — is relevant for the composer as well, who stated
that he “was thinking in terms of grandiloquence, tragedy and sublime
deaths.”
Let’s take a few examples, beginning with the sublime (a pure layer of
music rises to the surface, occasionally scored by verticals); lenghty
ululations come first, silky, aspirate, glacial glissandos… and we find these
spider-like musical threads throughout the opera, transparent and pitchless,
until the pitch is finally heard, at which time it is all the sharper. The
musical layers that rise and fall are marked with vertical events; church
bells that sound harsh by virtue of their materialness (tracks 1 & 2); or
the pointillism of the choirs, with each voice dotting itself onto a
composite canvas bristling with soloist effects (tracks 3 & 4) ; or the
stammering of a character (imitated at times mockingly by tape); and then all
that chapping, that rustling, that shrill screeching in the accompaniment
that ruffles and rumples the smoothness of the music throughout.
When the sublime comes in contact with the prosaic — human drama on one
side, music on the other — it creates a strange pathos, which we eventually
get used to. Each has its own, self-contained aesthetic, and these parallel
worlds attempt to communicate with each other from afar… or that is the
impression we have so long as we stubbornly refuse to open ourselves to the
audacious musicality peculiar to an acousmatic opera, where strange taped
sounds accompany voices singing almost trembling incommunicability — and
experienced by an orchestra aspiring with all its might to language and
meaning.
But the two do eventually meet. There are connections, encounters (of the
third kind) that yield strange musical hybrids, bizarre and moving dialogues
— somewhere between the smooth and the rough. And then the all too “divine”
timelessness of its delicious discontinuity is ruined, eradicated, when the
tape provides, with the greatest compassion, imitations and commentary; when
it grates with sounds played backwards…; when angels imitate birds while the
mother is dying; when rifle shots, the angry outburst of neighbors and the
pounding of Léone’s madness shatter her dreams; as well as every time that
the bizarre, coated with the stuff of daily life, becomes more human by
bringing language to a boil.
Jean-Christophe Thomas, Paris
(France) [ix-95]
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