100 years ago, on 29 May 1913, Le Sacre du Printemps was premiered in Paris, causing a riot.   Do you recall your response the first time you heard it?  What visceral, primal emotions, if any, did it stir up in you?  Was your first encounter through a recording, a concert performance, a ballet performance, or through Walt Disney’s Fantasia?  

My daughters know the Stokowski/Disney version of Le Sacre well, thanks to Mickey. My first contact with Stravinsky, that I can recall, came a little later, playing Petrushka in a youth orchestra.  Thanks to the vision of the Music Director, we played the 1911 version during a weeklong summer camp, then worked on the 1947 version in our weekly rehearsals for the first half of the year.  This was my first year in the ‘big’ orchestra, so it was also my first real experience of playing symphonic music, and what an introduction!  When people talk about making music accessible, it makes me both laugh and cringe.  The best way to make music accessible is by MAKING music.  I immediately fell in love with both Petrushka and Stravinsky.  I didn’t understand it in an intellectual way, I certainly could barely count it, but I got it, or it GOT me in a visceral/emotional/visual way.  Even without the ballet you can visualize the excitement of the crowds at the Shrovetide fair, the aloofness of the ballerina, the arrogance of the Moor, Petrushka’s desperate loneliness.  Stravinsky’s audacity was to mix the simplicity and familiarity of popular folk music with the most boldly dissonant harmonies and challengingly complex rhythms, and to dress it all up in evocative, brilliant orchestral colour.

Le Sacre is just Petrushka taken one step further.  In fact in Le Sacre Stravinsky takes the listener both forwards and backwards along the time continuum of musical history.  Whereas the musical material of Petrushka was taken from the recent past, that of Le Sacre gives the impression of being drawn from a much more distant time, even from the beginning of human existence itself .  The use of Russian folk material awakens a distant memory in us, almost as if we are hearing the origins of human song, embedded centuries ago into our DNA.  As in Petrushka, we can visualize the ballet through the music: nature stirring at the first hint of spring, the arrival of the various clans, the procession of the sage, the flickering of the bonfires, and the heightening frenzy as the annual pagan ritual unfolds.  While the source material is more ancient than in Petrushka, the musical techniques Stravinsky developed in that ballet are pushed to their limits, not only rhythmically and texturally, but also harmonically.   Le Sacre, was truly a revolutionary and provocative work, but it was also “at the limit of the fertile land”, to quote Paul Klee, at least at that point in time.  To put it in context, Mahler died in 1911, the same year that Der Rosenkavalier was premiered, while Bartók was taking a break from composing after the rejection of his opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.  In France, Debussy and Ravel were still going strong – in fact Jeux was premiered just two weeks before Le Sacre, on May 15, and Daphnis and Chloé was also featured in the 1913 Ballets Russes season.  I know what time I would go back to in my ‘Midnight in Paris’; a time when musical innovation was at its pinnacle; a time when impresarios, performers and the audience were prepared to take risks, even if they occasionally came to blows!!

As we celebrate the centenary of this amazing work, spare a thought for Pierre Monteux, the conductor of the premiere, and what must have been going through his head when Stravinsky first played through the score for him at the piano.  From memory, it was something like, “I need an aspirin.”

© Ollivier-Philippe Cunéo 2013

When I first read the score of Midnight Son, composer Gordon Kerry and librettist Louis Nowra’s chamber opera inspired by tragic events that occurred in Melbourne in 2005, I was immediately captivated by the score and the libretto.  Without giving too much away, the story is told in reverse, beginning with the protagonist’s suicide.  The remaining 11 scenes occur in his mind, as he untangles the web of deceit, lust and manipulation which has led him to this point, culminating in the initial knot, when he first met his future wife.   Like a good thriller, there are a number of unexpected twists and turns, as each scene takes on a thread from the previous scene to reveal the complexity of the characters and the situations they are in.  While Midnight Son deals with themes such as love, lust, and the relationships between men and women, it is also, for me, an opera about truth and fantasy, an element underlined by the score.

Preparing a new opera represents a unique challenge.  Opera is an art form that combines elements from all the arts, not only music and words, but also visual elements such as set, costume and lighting design, not to mention the practicalities and the magic which happen backstage.  Unlike a work of abstract music, in opera it isn’t enough to just try to understand and realize the composer’s intentions musically.  Although this is vital, the page must also be brought to life dramatically and visually.  When it comes to a new work, the conductor’s role is particularly important, because he/she is probably the only one working from the full score (in a contemporary opera, piano reductions or even midi recordings can only give a very approximate impression of what the orchestra will sound like) and therefore the onus is on the conductor to try to clarify the composer’s intentions as much as possible for the director and the cast.

In Midnight Son I was particularly fascinated by the moments when the orchestra stops playing, or when the pulsation slows or disappears altogether.  Music measures time, so when one has the feeling that time is suspended this seems significant.  Gordon Kerry uses this technique to underline moments in the libretto when the protagonist lies or when his lies are brought into question.  It’s as if time is suspended at these points connecting each of the lies in a timeless continuum, and indeed the tragedy unfolds as a direct result of the choices made based on those lies.  By underlining the moments at which the truth is altered, it is as if the composer is driving home the point that had honesty prevailed at any one of these instances the tragedy may have been averted.

In the wake of any tragedy, memory plays an important role in the healing process, by helping people to grieve, to remember their loved ones and to understand the lives they led by coming to terms with who they were, who they became and the journey that resulted in the tragic events.  Likewise, memory plays an important role in Midnight Son.  The opera takes place in the protagonist’s mind, alternating moments of real time with moments of remembered time when the pulsation is slowed, stretched or suspended and the orchestral textures take on an eerie, surreal quality.  It also requires the audience to use their memories to piece together the elements of the plot that are told in reverse.  Music plays a significant role in this process – when we listen to music, we consciously or subconsciously recollect the themes, textures, key-areas, motifs and figures in order to understand the musical discourse and structure.  Gordon Kerry’s score is full of such elements.  For example, in the first scene the protagonist quotes the exact pitches that his wife sings at their first meeting (scene 12 in the opera) as he recalls his “perfect” memory of his wife.

Midnight Son is presented by Victorian Opera at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne, from 16-23 May.  The outstanding cast includes Byron Watson, Antoinette Halloran, Dimity Shepherd, Roxane Hislop and Jonathan Bode, and it has been a great pleasure and extremely rewarding working with Director Nicki Wendt and the talented musicians of Orchestra Victoria.

© Ollivier-Philippe Cunéo 2012

If Carmen were a traditional opéra-comique, love would triumph and order would be restored.  Carmen, however, as the personification of freedom, cannot be captured and caged by any man, and so salvation and redemption are impossible.  This struggle between order and freedom is represented musically as the opposition between arioso and recitative: José’s pleas for Carmen to join him in a traditional ‘happy ending’ duet are rebuffed by Carmen’s insistence on the freedom of recitative.  As a result, the overall structure seems quite open.  Harmonically, however, the final scene is carefully worked out.

The first cadence is in C major, as José implores Carmen to leave with him to start afresh, while the tragic alternative, Carmen’s death, occurs in F-sharp major, a tritone away, as the offstage chorus triumphantly sings the Toreador Song.  The F-sharp/G-flat goal and its association with Carmen’s death is first hinted at by a loud first-inversion F-sharp major triad as she sings, “Mais que je vive ou que je meure” and then by threatening g-flat triplets at the words, “je ne t’aime plus.”  The principle key areas also point to the inevitable tragic conclusion: A-flat major (V of V), b-flat minor (relative minor of V).

The dominant is almost reached as Carmen states defiantly that even in the face of death she would repeat that she loves Escamillo, only to be interrupted by the chorus in A major (the relative of F-sharp minor).  Ultimately, only the repetition of the ‘Carmen’ (or ‘fate’) motif in F-sharp major, as José admits his culpability, can create a sense of conclusion.  There is no redemption, however, as the orchestra has nothing further to add other than to complete a perfect cadence.

© Ollivier-Philippe Cunéo 2011

Recently while I was studying the choreography for Romeo and Juliet my two and a half year old daughter said, “Daddy, I don’t want Peter and the Wolf”.  After only a few minutes of listening she had made the connection between the two Prokofiev pieces, and, as it so happens, Peter and the Wolf was composed in 1936 while Prokofiev was working on Romeo and Juliet.  

Romeo and Juliet was composed for a sophisticated adult audience, for the higher echelons of Soviet society who could go to the Bolshoi or the Kirov, while Peter and the Wolf was written specifically for children, and yet both are unmistakably by Prokofiev.

Having left Russia following the 1917 revolution, Prokofiev became a US citizen, before living in Paris for more than a decade.  When he decided to return to Russia in the mid-1930’s Stalin’s purges were escalating, reaching their apex in 1936, the year he settled in Moscow.  The doctrine of Socialist Realism, which basically dictated that the only purpose of art was to serve as propaganda for the Stalinist regime, had also recently been introduced.  Social Realism stipulated that all art be optimistic.  Tragic heroes and unhappy endings were forbidden, and the ideal Communist society had to be depicted in all its perfection with individuals only serving to illustrate positive qualities of that ideal state.  Clearly, Shakespeare’s play couldn’t have been further from this. As a result, Romeo and Juliet had a protracted birth.  Prokofiev had been commissioned to write a ballet by the Kirov in 1934, but they rejected the composer’s proposal, and the first performance didn’t take place until 1938 in Czechoslovakia.  The first two orchestral suites were completed in 1936. 

I don’t know whether Prokofiev was politically naïve, or whether his inner compulsion to compose was so strong that it overrode practical considerations.  Whatever the case, his music transcends these issues to speak to us regardless of our age, nationality, education, politics or religious beliefs.  Romeo and Juliet is the great masterpiece that it is because its message is not limited by the period in which it was composed, but deals in a most subtle and profound way with themes that are timeless and universal. Romeo and Juliet is now widely accepted as one of the great ballet scores.

100 years ago this month, Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde was premiered in Munich, conducted by Bruno Walter.  Mahler had died six months earlier, on 18 May 1911.  This was the first work Mahler didn’t premiere himself, and it was also the first time that Mahler gave Walter a new composition of his to study without having played through it for him first.  With regards to the complicated cross-rhythms in the final movement, he apparently said to Walter, “Have you the slightest idea how to conduct this?”  I haven’t!”

Mahler completed Das Lied von der Erde in New York in the winter of 1908-1909, and believed it was the most personal thing he had composed to that point. Death and life after death are recurring themes in Mahler’s work, but in Das Lied von der Erde the subject is no longer approached through philosophy or poetry, but through personal experience. In this work, which is both a song-cycle and a symphony, he confronted his own mortality and his increasing feeling of isolation from the world following the death of his beloved daughter, the diagnosis of his heart condition, the deterioration of his marriage and his resignation from the Vienna Hofoper, all within the space of a few months.  He found solace in Hans Bethge’s recently published anthology of ancient Chinese poetry and of the 83 poems, chose seven to set to music.  Mahler had always found inspiration in nature but, as a result of his heart condition, he could no longer do the physical activities such as climbing, hiking, swimming and rowing, which were so essential to him.  Mahler’s disillusionment and alienation from his environment are reflected in his choice of poems, in which man’s brief existence is at odds with the eternal renewal of nature.  Youth and beauty are transient, destined to wither and decay, and man’s lot is to die alone.  “Dark is life, is death.”

In the final song, Der Abschied (“The farewell”), which lasts as long as the other five songs combined, Mahler used two poems, “In Expectation of the Friend” and “The Farewell of the Friend”.  The song opens with solemn Grabgelaüte (“Death knells”) on the tam-tam, which are later developed in a lengthy orchestral interlude in the style of a funereal march inserted between the two poems.   It becomes clear that in Mahler’s vision the expected friend is in fact Death, and that through Das Lied von der Erde Mahler came to an acceptance of his fate and found comfort in the notion that through death man merges with nature and becomes eternal.  The final lines are Mahlers’ own:

My heart is still and awaits its hour!

Everywhere the dear earth blossoms forth in spring

and grows green again!  Everywhere and for ever distant

horizons gleam blue.  For ever, for ever…”

It’s a privilege to observe the final rehearsals for the Paris Opera’s new production of Götterdämmerung.  The complete Ring Cycle hasn’t been presented in Paris since 1957 and this Götterdämmerung is to be the final installment in a new cycle which has been unveiled over two years.  There is a tremendous buzz surrounding this event, and the honours fall squarely with Swiss conductor Philippe Jordan, who at 36 is now in his second year as Music Director of the company.

Time management is important at every stage orchestral, a balancing act between the need to run large sections and the need to work in detail, so it is fascinating to see the artistry with which Philippe Jordan skillfully rehearses this colossal 4 ½-hour score.  His ability to pass seamlessly from one language to another aids the flow of the rehearsal, as he addresses the singers in either German or English and the orchestra in French. During the breaks he chats with his music staff and language staff, before giving notes and encouragement to the singers.  In the remaining time he seeks out the director, Gunter Kramer, to see how things are coming together for the production team.  Not a precious second is wasted.

At the 4^th of 6 stage orchestrals, Jordan starts at the top of Act 3 and more or less runs the act, giving directions to the orchestra without stopping.  He is particular with what he wants with regards to ensemble, colour, intonation, and dynamics and after the break he pinpoints moments which require more detailed work, such as the 8 bars near the beginning of Act 3, where the 8 horns recall a leitmotiv from the start of Das Rheingold in canon.  It’s a very exposed moment and notoriously difficult as it lies very low on the instrument and must be played pianissimo.  On top of that, all eight horns must enter with the same tuning and the same dynamic.  Jordan is insistent that the intonation and the balance be right, but is also mindful of the fact that there are only so many times you can repeat a passage before everyone gets frustrated.

Act 1 offers a different challenge.  It lasts closer to two hours which means it isn’t possible to play through it all before the break.  Jordan’s approach is therefore to run larger sections, stopping to rehearse in detail when required, but always keeping an eye and an ear on the overall structure.  Not surprisingly in a work this length, the singers occasionally miss an entry or come in a few beats early or late.   Jordan is adept at putting them back on track with a gesture.  Throughout the rehearsals he barely looks at the score.

The orchestral playing is particularly impressive.  The sound is sweet and warm, the clarity of the instrumental textures is breathtaking, and while there are moments of great volume and intensity, such as Siegfried’s death, the sound is never harsh or forced.  Jordan’s interpretation flows very naturally, balancing attention to detail with a firm grasp of the overall architecture, as well as the drama.  Although, the only (nearly) complete run of the opera I hear is the pre-general, a six-hour marathon, it is clear that this will be a great success musically, no small achievement for a company which hasn’t staged the opera in over 50 years.