Saturday, May 14, 2016
A very strong church opera
BENJAMIN BRITTEN – PETER PEARS –
THE PRODIGAL SON – 1968
The first
thing we must take into account is that this church opera is a small production
with few actors and few musicians for a small space and little movement, a
church, ancient if possible. A Romanesque church would be great but in England it probably is some Norman
or later Tudor church, some crossing style between Romanesque and Gothic that
is original to England
This enables
Britten to play on disguises. The Abbot is going to be the Tempter. That’s both
natural and vicious, if not twisted, but that does not look like it, we do not
see it, because that’s some kind of convention we accept since we are in a
church and a story has to be told. The Abbot is the natural story teller and
the Tempter is the one who is telling jibes not to us this time but to the Younger
Son. The Monks can in the same way become the Servants and the Parasites. They
are just useful ancillary second grade characters or voices that only fill up
the background when necessary. That’s very conventional but very effective. We
thus can concentrate our attention on the only three characters that count, the
Father, the Elder Son, the Younger Son, plus of course the Abbot/Tempter who is
going to tell lies to make the Younger Son fall and who will later at the end
tell us the meaning of the tale.
The story is
known practically by heart by us all. The Younger Son asks for his share to go
into the world where he will be tempted three times by wine, by women and by
gamblers, to be abandoned then to his fate and curse to beg or steal if he does
not want to die of hunger. He realizes then that he has been lured by the
Tempter who was the stranger in the story at the beginning though he pretended
he was no stranger since he was the Younger Son’s inner voice. So this Younger
Son comes back to his father and begs to be given a job as a field servant. The
father refuses, dresses him up, gives him a ring, has the fat calf slaughtered
to have a feast and he convinces the Elder Son that forgiveness is the only
thing to do.
Britten gives
some dynamism to the story by using the wind instruments in contrast to or in
union with the few strings. The percussions are used as very simple punctuating
rhythmic accompaniment. The dynamism thus comes from the simple architecture of
winds versus strings like the two walls of the church rising into and
supporting the vault with the percussions amplifying the elevation our souls are
supposed to perform in this church nave. Elevation towards truth and
forgiveness. These percussions become silent in some crucial turning points of
the story like track 15 when the Younger Son begs his Father for a position as
a servant.
But this dual
architecture becomes fascinating at the end of track 16 when Younger Son and
Father convince Elder Son to forgive with two pairs of words, “dead” and “alive
again” on one hand, and “lost” and “found” on the other hand. The music and
singing are entirely built on echoes as if the two pairs were reverberating in
the church from one wall to the other, the servants amplifying the effect by
giving it some depth or weight.
That leads us
to the fundamental element of this church opera, the deepest Romanesque nature
of the tale. The Abbot at the end becomes the voice of divine truth, of
Christian morality, the voice that gives meaning to the simple story, that
elevates us over the anecdotes of the story. This is an essential dimension of
Christian teaching: the truth is always in God, but the Christians cannot get
to that truth or to that God without an intercessor, a go-between. Jesus is the
regular go-between when we want to speak to God, but in simple Christian life
the priest is giving the meaning of everything. He is the voice that sets us,
straying lambs or sheep, right on the truthful path. We then can go back out
into the world with that resounding moral or idea that is going to lead us on
the way. The Abbot here is the preacher who is telling us the meaning at the
head of the Danse Macabre speaking to both the people in the Danse and the
congregation looking at the Danse. Without that oral explanation, that truthful
discourse, there is no meaning in what is represented or told.
In fact we
could even go one little step further and say that all religions need that
voice to be able to create awe and
obedience among the congregation of the faithful, even if in the present case
this congregation is an audience and these faithful are spectators. Then the
whole play is about who is the stranger in the story and who is the stranger in
the performance. The Tempter should be the stranger but he is not since he is
the inner voice of the sinner who is turned into a stranger by abandoning his
family and going into the strange world where he is nothing except some
stranger who has to be robbed of his wealth to be rejected then as an unknown
and unimportant non-entity, the essence itself of a stranger, though he will
find some redemption in his homecoming and his father’s and then Elder
Brother’s forgiveness which gives him back some identity. Then the strangers
are the audience of course who are out of the story and yet the Abbot brings us
back into the story, or at least into the meaning of the story and we are no
strangers any more. Amen.
Dr Jacques
COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 1:32 PM 
