As part of the Festival d’Opéra de Québec, which shines with a thousand lights thanks to an exceptional production by the Faust by Gounod, commented on Saturday on our digital platforms, was created the opera Yourcenar — An Island of Passions also proposed by the Opéra de Montréal, initiator of the project, on August 4 and 6.
“I went around my prison, living freed me from it. I walked around the garden, the experience of love and its end. Is it eternity already? With my soul satisfied, I can die with my eyes open. The words of Marguerite’s final monologue are chiselled. The poetry is wonderful. It can sometimes be enhanced by music. Talk to Eichendorff and Hesse, whose verses met Richard Strauss in search of his Four last lieder.
Yourcenar — An Island of Passions is an opera to a libretto by Hélène Dorion and Marie-Claire Blais with music by Éric Champagne. All the communication was done like this, things are like this, and we’re not going, in extremispretending otherwise.
Prima la musica
Eric Champagne’s great intelligence is that he can put almost anything to music, even an almost impossible opera or cumbersome words. However, in Yourcenar— An island of passions, when the words become too beautiful, the thinking too deep, the words are said and read meditatively through a loudspeaker. Whether or not this is an acknowledgment of failure, it inevitably brings us back to the famous dichotomy of opera: Prima la musica, poi les parole (first the music then the words).
This adage has certainly earned us many beautiful operas on idiotic or insipid librettos. Starting from an idea or a text is a counterpoint, a legitimate current trend. When the Met creates Marnie Where The Exterminating Angel, we are going to see the operatic translation of a film by Hitchcock and Buñuel before the last opera by Nico Muhly or Thomas Adès
Here, the subject is more delicate. An artist. A writer, Yourcenar. “Especially not a biopic,” Hélène Dorion told us on July 23. Why is that ? Would that be shameful? So it’s not a biopic, because Yourcenar’s life is fictionalized, but it is, because, through a few steps, we go from A to Z, a choir taking care of the biographical elements, at the beginning for example .
This is precisely the subject of debate. What do we retain? How is this life uplifting? The interpenetration between life and writings; assumed homosexuality; the ecological vision before its time? It is evoked, not dug. That makes a book, a play, perhaps. Not an opera. When an intellectual thinks, she monologues (even if her companion next to her tells her “you’re right, write it down”). That, at the opera, is boring. And this is the 1er deed.
An embellishment by action
The first moment of opera (note, no theatre, since the death of Grace as seen by Angela Konrad is immediately a beautiful moment) occurs after more than 30 minutes, when a trunk arrives with sketches of Hadrian’s memoirs. Éric Champagne, who creates a very skilful soundtrack for the intellectual and sentimental moments, awakens the orchestra at this moment.
Then comes the 2e deed. And a lot of things are changing. Grace dead, Marguerite idealizes Jerry, himself in love with Daniel. And what happens? Confrontations, music, tensions. In short, opera!
The widow of 75-80 years infatuated with a homosexual ephebe, younger than her by 50 years, she doubts her power over him. What a beautiful subject! So beautiful that it was treated, in the masculine, in a sublimated way by Thomas Mann in 1912, in Der Tod in Venedig. It is very important to remember that, for Thomas Mann, the real subject of his novel is not homosexual attraction, but “passion as disorder and degradation; the ambiguity of the artist, the tragedy of the mastery of his art”. This is the sort of thing, strong, noble and uplifting, that opera can deal with.
Thomas Mann’s work shows the difficulty of translating writing to other arts. This is not the place to comment on the Death in Venice by Visconti and that of Britten, but this trio (book, film, opera) remains, on the subject of the artist tormented by his art and the excesses of adaptations from one art to another, a standard that suggests that the true-false opera artist biopic supposed to shed too much light on a personality is a dead end.
Should I try the experiment? The subject greatly stimulated authors and sponsors. He was treated with passion and sincerity. Éric Champagne has made an onslaught of inventiveness to bring the project to life, managing marvelously the appearance of a singer during a cruise. Angela Konrad’s show, which takes place out of time with a space in the form of a forum, useful projections and limpid colors, is judicious.
Thomas Le Duc-Moreau impeccably directs the Violons du Roy and keeps the cohesion of a group of singers evolving behind him. All the protagonists are excellent, even if Stéphanie Pothier sometimes tended, on Saturday, to cover certain sounds a little too much. Beautiful brief performance by Suzanne Taffot as singer and remarkable slaughter by Jean-Michel Richer as Daniel.