Of course we must protect the jewels of art. It’s all that’s left when serial crises and mediocrity take hold everywhere. Fragile and precious are the masterpieces, heavy with meaning and memory planted on the adventure of the past. Rather than spraying the windows of iconic paintings with soup, mashed potatoes or other undetermined substances, even in the name of a good cause, let’s save their mysteries. As for the impetus to proscribe books and works today to denounce the bad morals of their authors, it offers the air of medieval auto-da-fé, of sinister historical memory. Verlaine and Rimbaud were not altar boys. Neither did Picasso. But this incandescent legacy they leave us…
Some brave people risked their lives in the past to save cultural heritage. Museum curators still do it, in Ukraine or elsewhere. In our own latitudes, as the world needs to find its way back to the stars. Activism is redefining itself in perilous zones, sometimes flirting with obscurantism. It is better to save than to wither the splendors of art, when nothing is going right. We will never repeat it enough. Might as well sing it now…
I had seen films and documentaries on the subject, also read books dealing with the disastrous transfer by the director Jacques Jaujard and his assistants of the works of the Louvre just before the Nazi Occupation in France. Several works, including Mona Lisa and The Victory of Samothrace, will have landed in the crypts of the Château de Chambord between 1939 and 1945, after an operation of collective resistance of mad complexity. But an opera on the subject – without the Château de Chambord, because everything takes place in Paris – is a first. What to run to see The beauty of the world, to a libretto by Michel Marc Bouchard, directed by Florent Siaud and music by Julien Bilodeau, under the baton of chef Jean-Marie Zeitouni, at Place des Arts. It is presented again on Sunday.
We had waited so long for this show, under the pandemic reports. In the meantime, the planet has made three turns in its orbit. The opera gains in resonance there. Addressing the theft by Hitler’s troops of artistic treasures such as the destruction of modern, so-called degenerate works, the opera treats our present times implicitly. It combines elements of fiction and historical reality. The fate of Jewish collectors looted by the Germans is at the heart of the booklet. The course of Woman sitting by Henri Matisse, a painting stolen by the Nazis, long missing, found in Germany in 2013 then returned to the Paul Rosenberg estate two years later, runs through the action on its burning plot.
More classical than Bouchard’s previous opera, The Feluettes (taken from his play), this original creation, obviously also intended for export – we hope so – is magnified by the music of Julien Bilodeau, with exceptional violins and choirs, and by an inventive staging.
She also falls flat. His message, nonetheless strong, deserves to resonate in many latitudes. And the voices of bass-baritone Damien Pass, as Jacques Jaujard, and mezzo-soprano Allyson McHardy, as Rose Valland, the curator of the Jeu de Paume museum who helped so many Jews find their collections, enchant us.
This beautiful work, marked with the seal of quality, beyond an elegant prologue, really finds its rhythm from the second act. Then enters the scene the ogre of the Hitler regime Hermann Göring (Matthew Dalen, pervert at will), who gets his hands on treasures from the Jeu de Paume museum. He wants to nourish his spoils of war with classical works. Also destroy the most innovative, too subtle for the occupier. This striking scene knows how to show the flattening of some in the face of the tyrant and the revolt of those who seek to interrupt the artistic massacre. Without the character of Count Franz von Wolff-Metternich, German director of the Office for the preservation of the artistic heritage of occupied countries, who supports Jacques Jaujard in his saving mission, the opera would have seemed too Manichean. His presence ensures that all is not black, even in the worst camp.
With its multiple distribution, The beauty of the world does not pretend to play sustained emotions on the violin. These embrace us, however, during the humiliation and murder of expiatory victims, Jaujard’s Jewish assistant, Esther (wonderful France Bellemare), and Jacob, her handicapped son.
This resistance opera denounces the horrors of war and barbaric blindness, hammering home this to the audience: without art, what’s the point of living? We hum the epilogue long after its last notes.