Genesis of an Opera
by Joseph
Saint-Gelais |imso_9202-0001|
The idea of an operatic version of Ne blâmez jamais les bédouins (Never Blame the
Bedouins) by René-Daniel
Dubois came to me as early as the first rehearsals for the theatrical
production (the work was premiered in 1984) so much its structure, its
framework, its very breath called out for a musical envelope.
It was necessary, however, to wait until the arrival on the Montréal scene
of the company Chants libres before this opera project could become a
reality. After becoming convinced of the necessity of writing an a cappella
work, composer Alain Thibault began
to write and one year later, in September 1991, Ne blâmez
jamais les bédouins was premiered at the Théâtre de la Licorne in
Montréal.
With the original text for a solo actor, Thibault executed
minute edits to ensure an opera of reasonable duration in view of the extreme
textual and vocal difficulty that the performance entails. Thibault perfectly
seized the originality of the structure of Dubois’
text: the entangled confusion of vertical/horizontal leading threads. These
fragments of stories that the author gives us to follow are distilled by bits
and sequences, form a texture whose definitive design of which the spectator
(or the auditor) will not be able to seize until the very conclusion of the
presentation (or audition). If one analyzes the musical sequences of the
score, one ascertains that the composer has surpassed the simple setting of
text to music. He has attained a surprisingly ‘natural’ symbiosis
of poetry and music.
This is exactly why one could never classify Ne blâmez
jamais les bédouins in the category of ‘opera’ as one
ordinarily understands it, but rather in that of the more vibrant and active
category of total musical theatre of which Wagner
spoke. Only the character of Michaela has the right to several justifiable
melismas: she’s a diva.
On stage, I therefore wished to show, by mathematical displacement, all
the creative and poetic daring of these many cries/chants hurled aloud by the
twenty-nine characters from the bottom of their inner selves. It wasn’t
a question of making a versimo or naturalist production. When the final hour
has sounded and the definitive stakes are in place, the only thing
indispensable to the comprehension of the listener is a plenitude of
Meaning.
Joseph
Saint-Gelais, Montréal [xii-92]
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