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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