William Christie and Les Arts Florissants completed a three-year collaboration with the Festival de Lanaudière on Saturday at the Fernand-Lindsay Amphitheatre by presenting The Fairy Queena show designed with the choreographer and director Mourad Merzouki, adapted from Purcell’s original ideas, but whose effectiveness cannot be denied.
William Christie has long since become a music entrepreneur. He now has his own festival in the gardens of his estate and his own troupe of singers, cleverly named “The Garden of Voices”. He also makes his own musical concoctions: The Fairy Queen is one.
Complex genre
So before shouting “hurray, what a genius!”, we simply need to establish, at the base, what the work is in order to judge what has been done and to what extent the treatment is acceptable. The Fairy Queen is a “semi-opera” that mixes theater, opera and ballet. It is at the same time a triple plot, in which we find the Queen of the fairies (Titania) and her husband Oberon, couples from ancient Greece and an amateur theater troupe preparing a show, this theater within the theater opening up to comic effects. The story is freely adapted from the Dream of a summer night of Shakespeare.
Suffice to say that this work (1692) with its drawers and imbroglios is a puzzle. A puzzle to understand and a puzzle to put together. In 2009, Montréal Baroque had put together The Fairy Queen by evacuating the Greeks and concentrating on the Titania-Oberon opposition and the clash between their world and that of the commoners and their play. It was also the clash between theatre and music. William Christie takes a completely opposite gamble. He is not interested in the genre in which Purcell’s music was born, sweeps away the theatre, but seeks to highlight the music (sung or not) creating a new genre, a kind of sung ballet. The cuts are clever, and as long as you don’t understand anything about the plot (or plots), you might as well not understand anything at all, but get away with a stimulating show.
Breaking the codes by introducing hip-hop dance is a tried and tested recipe in Rameau’s operas for two decades (we “modernize” through ballets). Christie called on the choreographer Mourad Merzouki, who wants to “desacralize the elitist a priori that we can have with regard to classical music, by confronting it with a so-called popular dance that also knows how to be demanding.” It’s beautiful! We are moved…
Result: there is always something happening on stage. Good? Not good? It makes music go down like a letter in the post at a time when you have to create a stimulus every second. Basically, Christie and Merzouki have created a Purcell show for our time: the one where we do our shopping and cook from lunch boxes that contain to the nearest gram the carrots and feta we will need for our salad, the era of networks, even of the media, which feed us opinions that comfort us.
Two questions subsequently arise. What is the point of old instruments after all? Christie and Les Arts Florissants convince us of this usefulness through the finesse of the textures and dynamics. But, as long as we are going to put in hip-hop, why not follow Christina Pulsar’s path and not blend Purcell with a few episodes of modern jazz? We don’t have the answer, but moving away from Purcell means agreeing to move away even further.
A final word on the performance. Its intrinsic magic lies in the phenomenon of the troupe: singers and dancers are totally confused, and more and more confused as the evening goes on. This is the absolute magic of Mourad Merzouki’s proposal. And what if, by miracle, will or chance, it were a metaphor for a modern union of opera and theater? In this context, no voice, like no dancer, is to be distinguished, because it is a team effort, where everyone has been well chosen, where everyone has integrated a high-risk show, but of great originality and persuasive power.