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The Orpheus Experience - Preamble
"I am the Music, and with my soft tones, I know how to calm all the troubled hearts, and I can set even the coldest of spirits on fire with either love or noble rage." And it goes on, declaring that: "I inspire in souls a deeper desire to hear the resonant harmony of the heavenly lyre..." Striggio in Orpheo by Monteverdi
PREAMBLE by Alain Amouyal PILOT TREATMENT CONCEPT BOARDS 2016-2017 2000-2017
The theme of Orpheus is linked, on the one hand, to famous couples who have inspired great artists, and on the other hand, to the birth of the Opera, an important moment in the history of music, and of which "Orfeo de Monteverdi" represents the first masterpiece of this totally new genre from the fifteenth century. When one thinks of Orpheus, one remembers the famous monologue "I lost my Eurydice"...Orpheus gives in to the temptation of turning around, Eurydice disappears forever and Orpheus dies, torn apart by Dionysus' Maenads... The same tragic ending in Tristan and Isolde..."Isolde slowly slides onto Tristan's body, dead from extasy, dead from love and fidelity"..."Pelleas kisses Melisande passionately. Golaud hurries with a sword in his hands and strikes Pelleas before following Melisande through the woods in silence. Melisande is going to die...Melisande dies slowly, without saying anything..." So many "dramatic" endings that call out to us. We can ask ourselves, in effect, why this permanent feature in librettos has inspired the grandest composers and has given way to some of the greatest masterpieces in Opera. Maybe to remind us, as did Aristophanes in the the Banquet of Platon, that somewhere there is compensation for this suffering: Meditate and find the ideal and original unity again... Hence Wagner wrote to Mathilde Wesendonk: "...So the remains of the hero were adorned before being consumed into divine ashes. The lover threw herself in this tomb of flames and perfume so that her ashes would unite with the ashes of her beloved. Thus, they made only one! one element! Not two living human beings, but the divine original element of eternity..." As a watermark, in all these masterpieces, one finds coexisting with this drama a need to accede to totality and to a fusion in Everything in which the suffering of symbolic couples seems to be an obligatory passage, an "accent" is put on our human condition and the need to experience a metaphysical initiation in order to go beyond, to transcend this condition... The "nostalgia" surrounding infinity perpetually brings human beings above and beyond themselves. Constantly haunted by the notion of unity, man is and remains, according to Marcel Doisy's expression, " a knight of the impossible, a lover of the absolute"... ( translated from “Avant scène- Opera - Tristan et Isolde - JP Krop ). Thus the story of Orpheus and Eurydice is not just a pretty and painful love story. The legend of Orpheus also has a mythical and intiatory sense, as Mircéa Eliade evokes: "The myth tells a sacred story, that is to say a primordial event that took place in the beginning of time and in which the characters are Gods or civilizing heros." (translated from “L'épreuve du labyrinthe” - Gallimard). In "Orfeo de Monteverdi", if Orpheus is above all a talented hero with superhuman powers, a messenger of the Gods, whose lyre links the Sky and the Earth..." he is also a man and suffers like one...Orpheus left the original paradise for a world of pain, he took on the sufferings of a humanity victimized by a snake; he felt the despair of man without God, too attached to the Earth...thus his father Apollo intervenes to save him and take him to the sky..." and if (Monteverdi) transformed the fifth act...it is maybe because he insisted on adding his prayer of adoration, a prayer of acceptance, renunciation, and faith in eternal life..." ( translated from Avant Scène Opéra - La "juste prière" de Claudio Monteverdi - Françoise Ferrand) One finds again in Tristan and Isolde the same philosophic processes. The first theatrical representation of the myth of Orpheus is the Favola di Orpheo by Ange Politien, one of the most important Italian humanists of the 15th century...Politien's fable is interesting in more than one respect: first of all it reminds us of the importance of the great poet Thrace in Humanist thought and in the Renaissance: Orpheus is an obligatory reference of humanist rhetoric for which he symbolizes the creative strength of man - But Politien from the 15th century grants him a very particular importance because his thoughts are centered upon the founding role of speech that constitutes man: speech-expression, and therefore poetry, and speech-communication thanks to which society can establish itself and the history of man is made... On the other hand, the master of Politien, Marcile Ficin, sees Orpheus as clearly more mystical. He developped Platonic studies in Italy: it is Orpheus the theologist, the legendary founder of Orphic mysteries...that Ficin integrates into a philosophy which tries hard to unite Platonism and Christianity; under the sign of Orpheus the importance is granted by Ficin to music which he considers to purify our bodies and soul and bring us closer to God..." (translated from “Avant Scène Opéra” - Métamorphoses d'Orphée - Gilles de Van ) Thus, Orpheus is a valuable example and reminds us that "all humanist thought from the Renaissance is bent towards an effort of conciliation bewteen ancient philosophy and Christian theology, in a passionate quest for unity and love through the plurality of revelations..." When Monteverdi expresses that Orfeo inspires in him a "just prayer", it is indispensable to understand that he is not brought to prayer in a sentimental way and unclear because of the single beauty of a myth. It is rather an adherence to religious and philosophical theories that were developped in Florence during the Renaissance and that imposed themselves on all Italian and French humanism... that sees an Initiator in Orpheus, prefiguring the advent of Christianity...always in this perspective of reconciliation and synthesis, a parallel is established by the humanists between Orpheus' songs and David's Psalms because their hymns of praise are intended for the same God... "Thus, all eyes turn towards the dazzling face of Orpheus, all ears prove to be attentive to his song, all voices repeat his name with enchantment because, in his beauty, he lights up choirs, pierces the secrets of the Universe, and finds in it harmony and leads to divine meditation.( translated from “Avant Scène Opéra” - La "juste Prière" de Claudio Monteverdi - Françoise Ferrand ) “Orpheus is therefore like a cantor of God, more than a symbol, a driving archetype ( from the Greek word "arkhetupos"= primitive model ) ...capable of "guiding individuals and leading societies in a cultural effort and in battles which are by themselves heroic because they are mythically profound: evolutionary battles...The hero himself and his battle represent all of humanity in its history and in its evolutionary spirit... Orpheus' song and life illustrate the essential conflict that devastates human life, and is represented in all myths by the battle between the divine and the diabolical...in other words, an internal conflict between obedience to divine will and human will, which by its rejection of a transcedental vision, establishes laws of passage. According to Paul Diel, in the episode of his love for Eurydice - which is habitually interpreted as a sentimental, touching story - one finds Orpheus' very Dionysiac nature symbolically expressed: a heartbreak caused by intense but contradictory desires… The death of Eurydice symbolises the disappearance of the sublime force: that is to say the death of Orpheus' soul,which becomes ordinary...Orpheus implores the underground God. He obtains, as an exceptional favor, the promise that Eurydice will be given back to him, that the shadow of his love will be revived, so that he can take Eurydice back towards the light and that she will once again live for him. He mustn't turn around towards the perverse past that took him away from Eurydice, a past that made her turn into a shadow for him… But sublime regret, missed love, did not entirely heal Orpheus...he gives into the temptation of turning around; Eurydice disappears forever. (This same motif is found in the lady of Lot, a Judaic myth, a lady who by leaving a perverted place, Sodom, turns around and remains petrified)… Only a real and profound love could have inspired self-control in Orpheus, the strength to revive Eurydice… Orpheus undergoes the punishment that his insatiable inconstance fatally implies: "death of the soul", the agonizing struggle caused by contradictory desires. Following the fable it is women (his insatiable desire for women) who tear him apart (the Maenads)... But this mythical story doesn't resign itself to expressing the essential battle under the single perspective of defeat. The myth knows another complimentary version about the hero's death...that says that after having caused the definitive death of Eurydice, the symbol of exclusive love, Orpheus suceeds in reviving Eurydice, the symbol of his sublime aspiration..." ( “ Le symbolisme dans la mythologie grecque “ - P.Diel - Ed… ) The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, as we have outlined at the beginning of this preamble, is partially "linked to the history of Opera which counts over 30 works inspired by him... Without a doubt, this large number of operas is not in itself significant, because we can count as many works that were inspired by Iphigenic's story about Hercules. What is however more significant is the obvious relationship that unites the same genre of opera to Thrace poet-singer, a constant symbol of the power of music and song on the soul..." (Metamorphoses d’Orphée - Gilles de Van - Avant-scène Opera) This is why one evokes "a metaphysical aesthetic that confers the highest function, a scared function, on music..." on the subject of Orpheo by Monteverdi, in which, starting from the prologue, Striggio starts by making him sing music by putting in his mouth words about the effects that it obtains that are worthy of the most pure neo-platonians: " I am the Music, and with my soft tones, I know how to calm all the troubled hearts, and I can set even the coldest of spirits on fire with either love or noble rage." And it goes on, declaring that: " I inspire in souls a deeper desire to hear the resonant harmony of the heavenly lyre..." It is this sacred function of music that will be in question throughout this new project developped around the theme of Orpheus. In "ORPHEUS… the Seal of the Eternal Couple", Orpheus will once again go down into Tartar, there where in the past he failed, in order to confront the subconscious elements that made him turn around, to lead his battle, "to conquer", and to find Eurydice again forever. His "Return" which is beyond a traditional diagram, is an ode, a hymn to the human creator. It is an initiatory voyage where the hero, who has come back to the 20th century, will pursue his work as a poet-musician but also his evolutionary battle... (based on "L'avant-Scène Opera" #5, Orpheo by Monteverdi).

 

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