Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Monday, 07 July 2008
Between life and death:
A scene from Kopernikus
Claude Vivier's 1979/1980 opera for seven vocalists and seven musicians, Kopernikus, subtitled a Rituel de Mort, takes place at that Kantian point where the phenomenal and noumenal spheres impinge upon each other. A woman, Agni, finds herself in a metaphysical Wonderland, she herself her own Alice; she is located on a precipice that hovers between life and death. She tries to make sense of her new surroundings through dream images – Merlin, Mozart, Tristan and Isolde, and others. Ultimately she is unsuccessful at entering into the symbolic play of her own imagination and is left, at the close of the opera, quite alone.
Vivier's mature vocal work utilizes "everyday" language as a possibility (never realised) of entering that noumenal sphere. Perhaps it plays for him the same role that birdsong plays for Messiaen, whose music his own work resembles. Set against this everyday language there is a tapestry of music and nonsense language. Unsurprisingly, though the nonsense language beggars meaning, it also permits a vocal expression that transcends ordinary human conversation; the tension in the opera is between these two spheres.
In one of those happy coincidences which are too rare, I also saw Sarah
Kane's Crave last night, which takes place in that same grayish
light, that same no-
Vivier's work, because of his recognition of the role of heightened and quotidian language in their abilities to touch on this noumenal dimension, is perhaps more accessible than that of much contemporary music (though in another sense I doubt this very much – that the quotidian language is a red herring that does no more than lead into the deeper aesthetic experience we sense beneath that everyday conversation). Sex and violence, too, play a role in the conception of Vivier's metaphysic; a dangerous but necessary exploration.
Like Kane's Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, Vivier's final
work, the powerful and stunning Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der
Seele, contains a remarkable premonition of his own violent death in
Paris in 1983; unlike Kane's work, at the artist's death Vivier's work was
largely unrecognised as the remarkable aesthetic and spiritual achievement
that it was (Kane had been in newspaper headlines since the premiere of
her first work, Blasted, in 1995). His work continues unrecognised,
though there are signs that this is changing. There is a fine two-
In connection with the Lancaster concerts, the Guardian published this appreciation by Alfred Hickling. And below, from YouTube, is a version (with Spanish subtitles) of the last eight minutes of Glaubst du ..., which ends suddenly, eerily, at the point at which the manuscript stops – following the description of a sex murder. This appears to be from the 2004 Amsterdam production of Rêves d'un Marco Polo.
Posted at 9.01 am in /Music
Permanent link to this story
