Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

ROLAND DUBILLARD (1923-2011)– LES DIABLOGUES – ANNE BOURGEOIS – 2009

Un humour si grinçant et si froid qu’on tire la couverture à soi et qu’on s’emmitoufle dans une peau d’ours grizzly chauffante branchée sur panneaux solaires. C’est un de ces humours que l’on ne peut supporter qu’en scène car dans la vie réelle c’est exécrable, horrible, abominable et tous les gens moyens, bien dans le rang, intégrés comme les pièces d’un puzzle achevé se révolte contre ce type de remarques qu’ils prennent nécessairement comme des insultes.

C’est du genre (pas de citations de Dubillard ou d’un autre, simplement de ma vie quotidienne quelque part rue Taitbout à Paris 9, car vous savez les droits d’auteur et surtout le droit moral) qui suit :

« Comment ça va ?

-- Mal bien sûr, avec un air abattu et lassé qu’il répond, le grossier et bourru personnage.

-- Eh bien, voilà que je regrette déjà d’avoir demandé, sur un ton de colère et même de ressentiment sinon de haine. »

Que voulez-vous que ce pauvre homme y fasse puisqu’il va mal et que cela ne changera pas parce qu’il répondrait la réponse encensée et aussi insensée des bonnes convenances comme si les convenances faisait vivre un homme : « Bien, merci et vous ? » C’est alors que nos deux zèbres sur la scène pourraient se lancer l’un comme l’autre dans la liste de tous leurs maux et ils en ont plus qu’une charrette et ils concluraient, l’un comme l’autre, après s’être asséné des coups de cancer plein la figure, et quand je dis figure, « On ne parle pas de corde dans la maison d’un pendu ! Raison de plus de ce pendu-là ! »

Je dois dire que devant cet humour qui enfile des gouttes, des billes, des bulles et oublie les berlons, les berles, les agates et autres petits objets ronds qui amusent les gamins de l’école primaire pendant la récréation, des objets mâles car ces boules-là comme bien d’autres ne sont que des attributs des garçons dans les cours de batailles de marrons à l’automne, au point qu’à Bordeaux ils n’avaient planté que des marronniers d’Inde stériles. . . Devant cet humour donc je reste un peu choqué, moitié pensif, définitivement jaloux, plutôt reconnaissant, mais bien sûr totalement en désaccord avec le parisianisme d’un des deux personnages, le personnages de toute façon dominant. Dans un couple il y en a toujours un qui joue le rôle de l’homme. Et de là Dubillard pourrait se lancer dans la roulade jusqu’en bas de la pente pour ensuite y lancer ses boules de billard ou de pétanque à la tête des moqueurs.

Les deux acteurs sont bons mais on sent de bout en bout qu’ils ont fait ce spectacle cent fois et que sans faillir ni sans périr ils ont répété les mêmes répliques soir après soir et parfois deux fois dans la journée, en matinée et en soirée. S’ils osaient il le ferait aussi à l’heure de la messe ou pour shabbat puisqu’ils n’utilisent aucune machine, aucun ustensile mécanique et qu’ils ne se déplacent qu’à pied. On pourrait alors penser qu’il s’agit d’un kaddish pour le dépérissement de notre monde de consommation aveugle et d’injustice proclamée. J’entends déjà le violoncelle du  AVINU MALKEINU de Barbara Streisand (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YONAP39jVE).

N’y a-t-il que Paris pour produire cet humour si noir, si lexical, si guttural, si charnel parce que purement sémantique ? J’ai bien peur que oui, bien que je connaisse quelques Juifs qui en font autant, et parfois avec le sourire. D’ailleurs comment allez-vous ? Une question à ne jamais poser à Mr Sammler, un personnage d’un prix Nobel de littérature qui s’engage alors dans au moins une demi-heure d’explications sur toutes les opérations qu’il a subies, qu’ils a appréciées, dont il est très fier. . .  sur son lit d’hôpital, pourvu du moins que sa mère ne soit pas là : pas de chance elle est restée quelque part en Pologne et ses cendres font pousser le blé.

Il est sûr que les formules consacrées, s’entend bien sûr sacrées absolument idiotes, de la vie quotidienne en prend pas mal dans la figure et le fondement, même si les seules références à des femmes, dont une épouse qui n’aime pas la musique de placard, comme je la comprends, semble un tantinet misogyne et que Dubillard ne me dise pas que certains de ses meilleurs amis étaient des femmes. Pour moi les femmes on peut les aimer que si elles sont nos meilleures ennemies, et j’en sais quelque chose. Alors on a une ou deux amitiés mâles dans quelque placard. Mon dieu que cette musique de placard est étrange ! Comme dirait ou chanterait Leonard Cohen : « Don’t pass me by, please. » (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W90723antCM).

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

BENJAMIN BRITTEN – PETER PEARS – DEATH IN VENICE – ORIGINAL RECORDING – 1973 

If you just read the libretto without considering the music, hence without listening to the music, you have a very clear vision of this particular adaptation. It is in the text written if not composed in that libretto particularly faithful to Thomas Mann. So the main character, Gustav von Aschenbach is the eye through which we see, seize and deem the situation, what is happening in Germany first and then in Venice. Aschenbach is thus telling us the story he is witnessing. It is always his point of view that is expressed and what happens around him is seen through his eyes. He remains on the side, on the shoulder of the road, distant and yet close, physically distant and unable to enter the situation  he is watching, and at the same time this situation is entirely captured through Gustav von Aschenbach’s mind and consciousness via long introspective and speculative monologues. Gustav von Aschenbach hardly speaks to anyone apart from short questions, remarks or exclamations. No real discussion.

The whole story is the story of a rite of passage from Germany to Venice, from the hotel to the city, from life to death, from ancient Greece to modern world, from reality to mind, from the real world to imagination. And in fact this imagination is haunted by what he has done and achieved in his life and what he is going to leave behind and to whom he is going to leave it, hence his heritage.

He is haunted by Ancient Greece. There are numerous direct references to Greek mythology: Apollo, Ganymede, Hyacinth, Dionysus, Zephyr, and so many others. He is a classicist and as such has devised a theory of beauty based on distance, hence the absence of feelings, sentiments, passions, and yet this cult of beauty is a passion, even for him since he states at the beginning: “now passion itself has left me.” He has thus devised a passion for beauty that has lost or has been deprived of its emotional and sentimental dimension, as he says only once and in passing though not flippantly because his wife and his daughter are gone, meaning dead.

The Greek line calls upon Eros first, then Apollo (also called Phoebus), Hyacinth, Zephyr, Ganymede, all having to do with the love of a God Zeus or Apollo for a young man Ganymede or Hyacinth killed by jealousy, from Hera or Zephyr, and turned into something eternal, the constellation Aquarius, or eternally regenerating by its own means, the flower hyacinth, by their respective gods that were loving them and were marginally their lovers since the Greek could not think of love without physical intercourse, even and maybe especially pedophile both gay (Socrates) and heterosexual (Venus and Adonis). The parallel with Gustav von Aschenbach is the attraction he feels for the young teenager Tadzio (at the most 15 since Thomas Mann describes him has not having hairs in the armpits) who he would like to endow with his own creativity to propel him into some celestial glory.

This becomes clear when he evokes Socrates and Phaedrus when Socrates is going to drink the hemlock he has been sentenced to. It shows the older man does not want any physical intercourse with the younger man, but some mental exchange, communion, transfer so that Phaedrus can continue Socrates’ tradition, and he sure did but via Plato and his Phaedo and other dialogue or Phaedrus the play. Actually Gustav von Aschenbach is a writer in this adaptation like in the original and as such is writing, and in a way reading for us what he is writing, which is a description of and comment on what he witnesses and desires.

His dilemma is that his lifelong construction is coming to a point and a situation where and when it seems to be crumbling if not collapsing. His construction was a reduction of Eros to a mental shift from thought to reality along the following line: thought – feeling – mind – beauty – nature – ecstatic moment – genius – contemplation – reality, all coming true in the word meaning the use of words, but also a direct reference to God’s creative word, since he himself is a literary creator. This comes to grips with Tadzio and his real name Gustav von Aschenbach assumes to be Thaddeus which is mysterious as for its meaning. We can think that /thad-/ is one root and /-deus/ is another. The second is a nominative Latin noun referring to god and the first one seems to be connected to various roots in various languages boiling down to the verb praise, which would make the name to mean “praised by God, praised of God, God praising or God praised, always with the direct connection of God to the boy, God being the one who is praising, in this case the boy. You perfectly see the parallel with Ganymede and Hyacinth who were “loved” hence “praised” by their Gods Zeus and Apollo.

Gustav von Aschenbach is in the same way haunted by death, Socrates’ death, death lurking in Venice in the form of cholera, his own death he feels creeping up into him. He is dying, he will soon die, he actually dies on stage. If we might see some erotic dimension in the reference to Eros, we have to clearly understand that Gustav von Aschenbach blocked all occasions and all moments of desire he actually came to and never established communication or contact with the boy or with his mother. At best some eyes that locked onto some other eyes and that is probably a phantasm in Gustav von Aschenbach’s mind. He probably misunderstood the child’s curiosity or vague interest or even concern for that old man on the beach writing in his book. The smile of a child that age does not mean anything erotic, just plainly surprise, interest, curiosity or whatever along that line. When Gustav von Aschenbach finally comes to the conclusion that he loves him at the end of the first act, it is not what some would like to understand:

“Ah! Don’t smile like that!

No one should be smiled at like that.

(realizing the truth at last)

I – love you.”

That truth is love not the desire for any physical intercourse. At least not the one some may think of who cannot see love is not hormonal but first of all mental, and at that level the attraction is for what is identical, similar to you, with whom you can share an existential vista in life and achieve some similar goal: here the similar goal is beauty: the ideal mental beauty Gustav von Aschenbach has created and devised in his writing career and the beauty this boy embodies in real flesh, but a beauty that remains a mental set of proportions and forms. At the beginning of the second act he will come back to this phrase and will discard it:

“. . . the hackneyed words ‘I love you’. . . This ‘I love you’ must be accepted; ridiculous and sacred too and no, not dishonorable, even in these circumstances.”

Ridiculous for an old man to love a boy of course: what does he expect from that improbable meeting? But sacred too since the old writer loves his ideal of beauty realized in the proportions and forms of this boy, hence some divine connection between an ideal and a reality. And in no way dishonorable since it has nothing to do with voluptuous pleasures that would ne pedophile and thus despicable. And then he goes to the barber’s shop for the first time where he is not going to have himself made up for the boy, like an old teasing boy-tempting gigolo, but in fact he is going through some symbolical embalming. He is preparing himself not for the meeting with the boy that will never happen but for the meeting with death that is bound to come, that is coming, that is already here.

And yet he comes to a very selfish and self-centered position when he finally knows some epidemic is going around in Venice and express his resolution about the Polish family, hence Tadzio:

“They must receive no hint.

They must not be told.

They must not leave.”

And that’s the fundamental point. The boy has to stay because he has a part to play in the old man’s death and that part is clear at the end, the very end. He is the psychopomp, in Greek mythology a guide of souls to the place of the dead, of Gustav von Aschenbach. He is the one who takes him from the world of the living to the world of the dead. He is the one who is making him cross the Styx to deliver him in Hadesn he is Dante’s guide to hell, Virgil. He is the one who can best bring Gustav von Aschenbach’s life to its end and introduce him to his posterity. He is the best relay to that posterity. And yet it is vain in Gustav von Aschenbach’s mind because he has transmitted nothing to the boy, he has not even spoken one word to him. But he thinks; the boy is more or less following his intentions, sentiments, postures, etc., as if there were some mental extra-sensorial communication. But that is an illusion and we can consider it as pure nostalgia of an old man for the time when he was a boy the age of Tadzio.

This adaptation is a long song and cult to death seen as a closure and as a loss, but we have to wonder if the bigger loss is on the side of the dying or on the side of the living. The tale here tries to imply the loss is on both sides though it can only be mental, abstract, and yet the younger survivor is taking along into his own life the feeling and maybe emotion he felt when he locked his eyes onto Gustav von Aschenbach’s eyes and smiled. He will forever remember that moment of flippant emotion.

When you have read the libretto like that, you can then wonder what Britten is going to do with it and the music he is going to add to every single word, particularly when one actor is going to be constantly present along with Gustav von Aschenbach because he is The traveler who announces at the beginning there is going to be a passage from here to there; the Elderly Fog who is passing from Trieste to Venice on the boat and who is passing with a band of young boys going to Venice to meet the girls; the Old Gondolier who will pass him from the harbor to the Lido against his will and disappear before he could pay for the ride; the Hotel Manager who is passing him from the entrance to his room and from his room to the beach through his window he opens, and from the hotel to the outside world on departure day; the Leader of the Players who is passing everyone from their rich surrounding to his sorry and squalid songs from the bleak world outside; the Hotel Barber who will embalm him in the second act into a fake renewed person or perambulating body at the most, passing him from the old living person he was, maybe still is, to a younger looking vain already dead perambulating corpse; and finally Dionysus, the son of Zeus and Semele who was killed by Hera, Zeus’ wife, and yet Zeus managed to save the young embryo of Dionysus by embedding him in his thigh to incubate till birth them parted.

This Dionysus appears to Gustav von Aschenbach in his dream as the opponent and contender of Apollo. Against Apollo’s trinity of “beauty, reason, form” that founds Gustav von Aschenbach’s belief in non-erotic and de-carnalized beauty based on mental reason and abstract form, Dionysus defends a more sensitive, emotional, passionate, sense-based life:

“Receive the stranger god. . .”

“Do not turn away from life. . . “

“Do not refuse the mysteries. . . “

“He who denies the god, denies his nature. . . “

“Come! Beat on the drums. . . “

“Stumble in the reeling dance. . . “

“Goad the beasts with garlanded staves,

Seize their horns,

Ride into the throng.

Behold the sacrifice. . . “

“Taste it, taste the sacrifice.

Join the worshippers;

Embrace, laugh, cry;

To honor the god.

I am he!”

This Dionysus in Gustave von Aschenbach’s dream defeats Apollo and yet the dreamer when he wakes up is not able to enter the dance of love, of pleasure, of bliss, of physical enjoyment. He will remain with Apollo and his de-carnalized conception of love as beauty and not orgasm. Gustav von Aschenbach did not have a wet dream in his sleep in spite of Dionysus. In fact he never got his feet wet because he never went to the sea and he only crossed water pieces of any size with a ship, a gondola or a bridge, never feet first in the water.

We can regret this character’s impotence or frigidity but he is not in anyway trying to seduce the boy, which would make him a pedophile; not trying to make the boy seduce him since he never encouraged any contact by being unable to establish even the beginning of such contact.

He is a writer who is conscious at the end of his life that he leaves behind no one and maybe nothing that could perpetuate his creativity. Thomas Mann like Benjamin Britten left this world with no one to continue their work. At best their works have been collected and are still published or performed but in no way continued though we could say many writers and composers owes something, maybe  a lot, to Thomas Mann or Benjamin Britten. So after all it is for Mann and Britten some sad nostalgia for youth at the time when they bare passing to the other side with the help of a psychopomp vision of a young teenager who looks beautiful to them in their old age.

The music is in itself a marvelous experience. I do not want to give all the original points it contains. It is entirely conceived and designed to set up the meaning of the opera. Every single moment, every single character and at times every single emotion or feeling, reflection or thought of Aschenbach’s are supported, emphasized and magnified by the music. I will only give some examples.

The fact that there is no overture transforms the first scene into the most meaningful element of the opera. It is the archetype of the whole architecture with the two main singers of the opera, one character, Gustav von Aschenbach, here impersonated by Peter Pears, and the singer John Shirley-Quirk impersonating seven characters. In fact all along it is going to be a duel, a fencing confrontation between the two and the seven characters of the second singer are of course one mega-character: the archetypical psychopomp who will deliver Gustav von Aschenbach to death when the eighth impersonations of this mega-character who does not sing nor speak in the opera, viz. Tadzio, gives the signal of death Gustav von Aschenbach needs to finally pass over.

This introductory scene gives to the overture at the beginning of the second scene, the passage to Venice on the ship the most dramatic value with the mega-character tempting, teasing Gustav von Aschenbach into his destiny which is to die, and he even predicts how he will die, when he will die, when his “pretty little darling” decides. In fact this meta-character is Dionysus himself who is only supposed to be a voice in the opera. Dionysus calls for real life, real love, real passion, that is to say physically and hormonally fulfilled love, passion, life, in the form of a dance to celebrate the sacrifice offered to the God of mysteries, and this sacrifice is always human, though it is no longer performed as such by any priest but is a self-sacrifice in which a mortal offers himself to this God of mysteries when time has come to die. Death is no longer a plague, like it is described in Venice, but it is a self-offering to the God of mysteries. We are here at the root of death as liberation.

But to enjoy that passing over you need a psychopomp and that is the meta-character, that is Tadzio, the meta-character’s silent impersonation. When we reach the last wordless scene, or nearly wordless, a vague chorus in the far distance calling the name of Tadzio, and a final exhaling breath on Gustav von Aschenbach’s side in the shape of Tadzio’s name and, so say the stage directions, “at a clear beckon from Tadzio,” Gustav von “Aschenbach slumps in his chair.” And the psychopomp is not needed any more, thus “Tadzio continues his walk far out to sea.”

Every intervention of this psychopomp Dionysus, in any impersonation is marked by the music in an original way.

When Gustav von Aschenbach reflects on life, arts, death, love or whatever other mental subject he sings a cappella with only some piano notes now and then to punctuate his thinking. When he goes to the beach the music becomes luminous and Tadzio is introduced by what I think is a metallophone or xylophone: clear, metallic notes in light succession. Very beautiful and happy, sky deep but with no mystery, no secret, just attraction and appeal, but the appeal of beauty, though as Gustav von Aschenbach says “this beauty. . . Discovered through the senses And senses lead to passion . . . And passion to the abyss.” And this abyss is Dionysus message: “. . . taste the sacrifice. Join the worshippers, embrace, laugh, cry, to honour the god.” Note the trinity of “embrace, laugh, cry.” There are many other instances of such trinities of words like the second and last instance of eating strawberries that are declared “soft, musty, over-ripe,” which makes them the symbolic hemlock Gustav von Aschenbach who thinks he is Sicrates at that moment shortly before his final demise, will die of. And Gustav von Aschenbach turns Dionysus’ sacrifice around in his mind and it becomes “O the taste of knowledge.” And remember Apollo’s trinity of “beauty, reason, form” that echoed Gustav von Aschenbach’s “simplicity, beauty, form.” And Gustav von Aschenbach’s “so be it” of the first scene in which he accepts to go south as the psychopomp traveler tells him to do, will be echoed by the “so be it, so be it” on his return to the hotel, to Tadzio, after his failed moving out. It will then continue into the “Ite, missa est” of the priest in Saint Mark’s, accompanied by tolling bells (and that is not the only time: we had those tolling bells in the overture to Venice. And this resignation will become his acceptation of Dionysus’ decision about his sacrifice: “Let the gods do what they will with me.” And just an instant later: “Do what you will with me.”

That strong sense of resignation is entirely contained in the last remark of the Hotel manager: “We must all lose What we think to enjoy the most.” And the music shifts to flutes and the beach and Tadzio and his fight with Jaschiu and his message it is time to move out since he Tadzio is no longer a boy because he has been defeated and nearly choked to death, his face held down in the sand: he has become a man and as such cannot be adulated as pure beauty by Gustav von Aschenbach. The light aerial surreal and outlandish music of the end carries the two out and brings us to a concluding vision of our own passage to the other side of the Styx river, ferried over by Charon in his boat.

We could take every scene and show how the music transcends the simple situations and gives them a new dimension, a new greatness, at times when it is satirical a grandiose, even grandiloquent greatness. And I must admit this recording with Peter Pears and all the  other singers is clear and luminous. We can follow the words that are being sung because the articulation is careful and targets understanding, which is often rare on the opera stage. Opera English has a tendency to become a foreign Himalayan language when sung by some opera singers or even opera companies. Some conductors probably require that kind of articulation that mashes up the language. And that may happen even with this opera and since this recording is the original recording under the guidance of Benjamin Britten himself we can consider that the productions that are difficult to hear are not Benjamin Britten’s conception.

To conclude I think it would be a good thing if anyone who wants to penetrate this opera started with this recording before moving to others and particularly to video productions, DVD of course. More about that with a couple of DVD productions of this opera later on and in due place.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

ÉRIC-EMMANUEL SCHMITT – LE LILBERTIN – BERNARD MURAT - 2007

La pièce est légèrement trop longue. Il est vrai qu’un libertin ça libertine mais là le libertinage est un peu en roue libre parfois et la route comme monte ici et là ce qui rend la roue libre un peu poussive.

L’idée de base est amusante : peindre le grand, le célèbre, l’inénarrable Denis Diderot en philosophe mécéné par un quelconque noble et qui s’adonne à son passe-temps favori puisqu’il n’a pas de soucis d’argent, la philosophie qui est le farniente corporel et la surchauffe mentale d’un part et d’autre part à une sexualité débridée faite de courtisaneries et de libertineries, toutes activités musculaires, musculantes et musculatoires, et encore pas tous, les muscles, et faites de plaisirs de bouche, et là tous vraiment. A misère sociale il faut des mots nouveaux pour guérir les maux anciens. Et la misère sociale chez notre Denis est qu’il est entretenu par la noblesse qu’il est sensé exécrer mais qu’il tolère largement tant qu’elle paie.

Alors entre une escroque qui se dit peintre, l’épouse légitime, la fille, une amie de la fille et son « assistant », sans compter le chat de l’antichambre, il est très occupé, et encore on nous épargne une petite aventure de tendresse avec l’assistant, ce qui aurait changé de la sauce baroquement perpétuelle de sa cour facile, et de ses tentatives successivement interrompues. Avec Diderot le coïtus ne risque pas de porter de fruits : il est interrompu plus souvent que de coutume.

On apprend que l’éthique renvoie à la morale et que la morale renvoie à l’éthique. On appelle cela un cercle vicieux, ce qui est un comble pour morale et éthique. Je vous dis pas à quoi vertu va renvoyer, à petite probablement, et petite renverra à culotte, et on aura un nouveau cercle vicieux, la quadrature du cercle en quelque sorte en ajoutant que culotte renvoie naturellement à sans-culotte. Et envoyez nous un air de Carmagnole, et deux ou trois milles aristocrates à la guillotine.

A force d’être sérieusement un philosophe dilettante et un amant inachevé Diderot risque fort de finir comme un renard belge. Si vous ne savez pas la spécialité du renard belge, demandez donc aux Wallons, ils vous diront s’ils se rappellent qu’ils nous doivent bien cela puisque ils ont volé les pinderlots del Castafiore entre le château de Moulinsart et la Boucherie Sans-Os.

Mais que reste-t-il après tout ce charivari amoureux, enfin hormonalement perturbé ? Pas grand-chose sinon quelques bons mots et des aphorismes sans importances puisqu’ils sont débités si vite qu’on n’en entend que les virgules et les pauses. Il est vrai que si les acteurs avaient parlé normalement la pièce aurait duré trois heures. On ne fait plus ça depuis Louis XIV et la Révolution Française a remplacé la roue qui faisait un specatcle d’au moins douze heures, et encore il fallait parfois achever l’acteur sur sa roue qui n’en finissait pas de mourir, par la guillotine qui permet d’étêter cent nobles ou contre-révolutionnaires en environ trois heures et si on a une batterie de cinq guillotines, cela prend encore moins de temps, j’entends moins d’une heure, surtout qu’on a économisé en ce temps sur le prêtre et ses bouffonneries pour mourants programmés. Laissez-les donc mourir ! La première industrialisation, enfin proto-industrialisation, de la peine de mort. Et encore ils auraient pu brancher la machine à vapeur d’un autre Denis, le Papin, pour remonter la lame plus vite. Prochaine étape Allemagne 1933.

Dommage car on peut lui en faire dire des sottises à Diderot et à son Jacques, ce Jacques que l’escroque-peintre a tenté de peindre avant que le Diderot ne passe une robe de chambre, sans chemise et sans pantalon bien sûr, et parfois on pourrait y trouver une perle dans une meule de foin. En d’autres termes la pièce souriante m’a parfois rappelé l’étable des fermes où je passais mes étés : elle m’a remémoré l’odeur du foin et même son goût quand j’étais puni à dormir et manger avec les vaches. Heureusement la laitière ou le vacher venait me consoler la nuit. Et ni l’une ni l’autre n’étaient circoncis

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

BENJAMIN BRITTEN – MYFANWY PIPER – DEATH IN VENICE – 1973 – LIBRETTO

If you just read the libretto without considering the music, hence without listening to the music, you have a very clear vision of this particular adaptation. It is in the text written if not composed in that libretto particularly faithful to Thomas Mann. So the main character, Gustav von Aschenbach is the eye through which we see, seize and deem the situation, what is happening in Germany first and then in Venice. Aschenbach is thus telling us the story he is witnessing. It is always his point of view that is expressed and what happens around him is seen through his eyes. He remains on the side, on the shoulder of the road, distant and yet close, physically distant and unable to enter the situation  he is watching, and at the same time this situation is entirely captured through Gustav von Aschenbach’s mind and consciousness via long introspective and speculative monologues. Gustav von Aschenbach hardly speaks to anyone apart from short questions, remarks or exclamations. No real discussion.

The whole story is the story of a rite of passage from Germany to Venice, from the hotel to the city, from life to death, from ancient Greece to modern world, from reality to mind, from the real world to imagination. And in fact this imagination is haunted by what he has done and achieved in his life and what he is going to leave behind and to whom he is going to leave it, hence his heritage.

He is haunted by Ancient Greece. There are numerous direct references to Greek mythology: Apollo, Ganymede, Hyacinth, Dionysus, Zephyr, and so many others. He is a classicist and as such has devised a theory of beauty based on distance, hence the absence of feelings, sentiments, passions, and yet this cult of beauty is a passion, even for him since he states at the beginning: “now passion itself has left me.” He has thus devised a passion for beauty that has lost or has been deprived of its emotional and sentimental dimension, as he says only once and in passing though not flippantly because his wife and his daughter are gone, meaning dead.

The Greek line calls upon Eros first, then Apollo, Hyacinth, Zephyr, Ganymede, all having to do with the love of a God Zeus or Apollo for a young man Ganymede or Hyacinth killed by jealousy, from Hera or Zephyr, and turned into something eternal, the constellation Aquarius, or eternally regenerating by its own means, the flower hyacinth, by their respective gods that were loving them and were marginally their lovers since the Greek could not think of love without physical intercourse, even and maybe especially pedophile both gay (Socrates) and heterosexual (Venus and Adonis). The parallel with Gustav von Aschenbach is the attraction he feels for the young teenager Tadzio (at the most 15 since Thomas Mann describes him has not having hairs in the armpits) who he would like to endow with his own creativity to propel him into some celestial glory.

This becomes clear when he evokes Socrates and Phaedrus when Socrates is going to drink the hemlock he has been sentenced to. It shows the older man does not want any physical intercourse with the younger man, but some mental exchange, communion, transfer so that Phaedrus can continue Socrates’ tradition, and he sure did but via Plato and his Phaedo and other dialogue or Phaedrus the play. Actually Gustav von Aschenbach is a writer in this adaptation like in the original and as such is writing, and in a way reading for us what he is writing, which is a description of and comment on what he witnesses and desires.

His dilemma is that his lifelong construction is coming to a point and a situation where and when it seems to be crumbling if not collapsing. His construction was a reduction of Eros to a mental shift from thought to reality along the following line: thought – feeling – mind – beauty – nature – ecstatic moment – genius – contemplation – reality, all coming true in the word meaning the use of words, but also a direct reference to God’s creative word, since he himself is a literary creator. This comes to grips with Tadzio and his real name Gustav von Aschenbach assumes to be Thaddeus which is mysterious as for its meaning. We can think that /thad-/ is one root and /-deus/ is another. The second is a nominative Latin noun referring to god and the first one seems to be connected to various roots in various languages boiling down to the verb praise, which would make the name to mean “praised by God, praised of God, God praising or God praised, always with the direct connection of God to the boy, God being the one who is praising, in this case the boy. You perfectly see the parallel with Ganymede and Hyacinth who were “loved” hence “praised” by their Gods Zeus and Apollo.

Gustav von Aschenbach is in the same way haunted by death, Socrates’ death, death lurking in Venice in the form of cholera, his own death he feels creeping up into him. He is dying, he will soon die, he actually dies on stage. If we might see some erotic dimension in the reference to Eros, we have to clearly understand that Gustav von Aschenbach blocked all occasions and all moments of desire he actually came to and never established communication or contact with the boy or with his mother. At best some eyes that locked onto some other eyes and that is probably a phantasm in Gustav von Aschenbach’s mind. He probably misunderstood the child’s curiosity or vague interest or even concern for that old man on the beach writing in his book. The smile of a child that age does not mean anything erotic, just plainly surprise, interest, curiosity or whatever along that line. When Gustav von Aschenbach finally comes to the conclusion that he loves him at the end of the first act, it is not what some would like to understand:

“Ah! Don’t smile like that!

No one should be smiled at like that.

(realizing the truth at last)

I – love you.”

That truth is love not the desire for any physical intercourse. At least not the one some may think of who cannot see love is not hormonal but first of all mental, and at that level the attraction is for what is identical, similar to you, with whom you can share an existential vista in life and achieve some similar goal: here the similar goal is beauty: the ideal mental beauty Gustav von Aschenbach has created and devised in his writing career and the beauty this boy embodies in real flesh, but a beauty that remains a mental set of proportions and forms. At the beginning of the second act he will come back to this phrase and will discard it:

“. . . the hackneyed words ‘I love you’. . . This ‘I love you’ must be accepted; ridiculous and sacred too and no, not dishonorable, even in these circumstances.”

Ridiculous for an old man to love a boy of course: what does he expect from that improbable meeting? But sacred too since the old writer loves his ideal of beauty realized in the proportions and forms of this boy, hence some divine connection between an ideal and a reality. And in no way dishonorable since it has nothing to do with voluptuous pleasures that would ne pedophile and thus despicable. And then he goes to the barber’s shop for the first time where he is not going to have himself made up for the boy, like an old teasing boy-tempting gigolo, but in fact he is going through some symbolical embalming. He is preparing himself not for the meeting with the boy that will never happen but for the meeting with death that is bound to come, that is coming, that is already here.

And yet he comes to a very selfish and self-centered position when he finally knows some epidemic is going around in Venice and express his resolution about the Polish family, hence Tadzio:

“They must receive no hint.

They must not be told.

They must not leave.”

And that’s the fundamental point. The boy has to stay because he has a part to play in the old man’s death and that part is clear at the end, the very end. He is the psychopomp, in Greek mythology a guide of souls to the place of the dead, of Gustav von Aschenbach. He is the one who takes him from the world of the living to the world of the dead. He is the one who is making him cross the Styx to deliver him in Hadesn he is Dante’s guide to hell, Virgil. He is the one who can best bring Gustav von Aschenbach’s life to its end and introduce him to his posterity. He is the best relay to that posterity. And yet it is vain in Gustav von Aschenbach’s mind because he has transmitted nothing to the boy, he has not even spoken one word to him. But he thinks; the boy is more or less following his intentions, sentiments, postures, etc., as if there were some mental extra-sensorial communication. But that is an illusion and we can consider it as pure nostalgia of an old man for the time when he was a boy the age of Tadzio.

This adaptation is a long song and cult to death seen as a closure and as a loss, but we have to wonder if the bigger loss is on the side of the dying or on the side of the living. The tale here tries to imply the loss is on both sides though it can only be mental, abstract, and yet the younger survivor is taking along into his own life the feeling and maybe emotion he felt when he locked his eyes onto Gustav von Aschenbach’s eyes and smiled. He will forever remember that moment of flippant emotion.

When you have read the libretto like that, you can then wonder what Britten is going to do with it and the music he is going to add to every single word, particularly when one actor is going to be constantly present along with Gustav von Aschenbach because he is The traveler who announces at the beginning there is going to be a passage from here to there; the Elderly Fog who is passing from Trieste to Venice on the boat and who is passing with a band of young boys going to Venice to meet the girls; the Old Gondolier who will pass him from the harbor to the Lido against his will and disappear before he could pay for the ride; the Hotel Manager who is passing him from the entrance to his room and from his room to the beach through his window he opens, and from the hotel to the outside world on departure day; the Leader of the Players who is passing everyone from their rich surrounding to his sorry and squalid songs from the bleak world outside; the Hotel Barber who will embalm him in the second act into a fake renewed person or perambulating body at the most, passing him from the old living person he was, maybe still is, to a younger looking vain already dead perambulating corpse; and finally Dionysus, the son of Zeus and Semele who was killed by Hera, Zeus’ wife, and yet Zeus managed to save the young embryo of Dionysus by embedding him in his thigh to incubate till birth them parted.

This Dionysus appears to Gustav von Aschenbach in his dream as the opponent and contender of Apollo. Against Apollo’s trinity of “beauty, reason, form” that founds Gustav von Aschenbach’s belief in non-erotic and de-carnalized beauty based on mental reason and abstract form, Dionysus defends a more sensitive, emotional, passionate, sense-based life:

“Receive the stranger god. . .”

“Do not turn away from life. . . “

“Do not refuse the mysteries. . . “

“He who denies the god, denies his nature. . . “

“Come! Beat on the drums. . . “

“Stumble in the reeling dance. . . “

“Goad the beasts with garlanded staves,

Seize their horns,

Ride into the throng.

Behold the sacrifice. . . “

“Taste it, taste the sacrifice.

Join the worshippers;

Embrace, laugh, cry;

To honor the god.

I am he!”

This Dionysus in Gustave von Aschenbach’s dream defeats Apollo and yet the dreamer when he wakes up is not able to enter the dance of love, of pleasure, of bliss, of physical enjoyment. He will remain with Apollo and his de-carnalized conception of love as beauty and not orgasm. Gustav von Aschenbach did not have a wet dream in his sleep in spite of Dionysus. In fact he never got his feet wet because he never went to the sea and he only crossed water pieces of any size with a ship, a gondola or a bridge, never feet first in the water.

We can regret this character’s impotence or frigidity but he is not in anyway trying to seduce the boy, which would make him a pedophile; not trying to make the boy seduce him since he never encouraged any contact by being unable to establish even the beginning of such contact.

He is a writer who is conscious at the end of his life, that he leaves behind no one and maybe nothing that could perpetuate his creativity. Thomas Mann like Benjamin Britten left this world with no one to continue their work. At best their works have been collected and are still published or performed but in no way continued though we could say many writers and composers owes something, maybe  a lot, to Thomas Mann or Benjamin Britten. So after all it is for Mann and Britten some sad nostalgia for youth at the time when they bare passing to the other side with the help of a psychopomp vision of a young teenager who looks beautiful to them in their old age.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

MARIVAUX – LA SECONDE SURPRISE DE L’AMOUR – LUC BONDY – 2008

Marivaux mérite le dénuement car il est un théâtre purement mental et verbal. Qu’importent les accessoires car on n’en a nullement besoin. Cette pièce comme les autres développent ce dénuement qui tient presque de la nudité scénique. On se demande d’ailleurs pourquoi un chemin tortueux en gravier blanc parcourt généreusement le praticable. La tortuosité est dans la tête des personnages.

On retrouve naturellement les différences sociales de serviteurs dépendants qui font tout ce qu’ils peuvent pour obtenir les solutions qui les avantagent. Ils n’ont pas besoin de syndicats car ils savent faire leur cuisine et un syndicat ferait tout exploser, car ils invoqueraient la classe ouvrière tout entière.

Mais l’important est l’intrigue nécessairement amoureuse et celle-ci ne manque pas de mordant. Une jeune, très jeune veuve, qui plus est Marquise, veut garder son veuvage jusqu’à la mort : définitivement rien ne va plus Madame la Marquise ; une jolie chanson d’ailleurs quand tout va très bien. On comprend très vite que c’est pour elle une façon d’écarter le Comte, un vieux qui veut épouser une jeunesse, et en même temps de voir dans les plus jeunes qui peut bien faire l’affaire. Une démarche amoureuse plutôt surprenante mais on est dans un temps où les femmes doivent être précautionneuses.

Ne voilà-t-il pas que celui qu’elle remarque est dans une situation similaire. Celle qu’il aimait ayant refusé d’épouser celui que son père avait choisi pour elle a prononcé ses vœux dans un couvent quelconque. Mais pour lui une de perdue n’est pas mille de retrouvées ou même de trouvées. Il a des atomes crochus (leurs malheurs spécifiques mais similaires) avec la Marquise, mais il n’est que Chevalier. Le rang fait que la Marquise qui en plus est riche doit se prononcer la première, or elle aimerait que ce soit l’inverse, et donc que l’ordre nobiliaire soit inversé. Crime de lèse noblesse.

Alors commence une glauque et plus que maussade, ce qui la rend amusante, chasse au mariage qui demande du style, de la persévérance et surtout de l’abandon aux sentiments en un siècle où pour les nantis on ne parlait que d’affaires et de contrats de mariage. Suivez les dédales, ne vous empêtrez pas les pieds dans les rigoles et gardez vos souliers loin des ruisseaux plutôt fangeux de ce temps marivaudien qui ne connaissait pas vraiment le tout à l’égout.

Peut-être puis-je émettre une remarque sur un rythme qui aurait pu être accéléré de deux ou trois pour cent. Dans les méandres de l’intrigue il y a ici et là quelques ralentissements, voire longueurs. Mais le vélo anachronique est plus qu’amusant. Autant que ceux du Roi Ubu de la Comédie Française il y a six ans, ou les patins à roulette du même à La Villette il y a encore plus d’années.

Anachronisons gaiement et le ciel ne nous tombera pas sur la tête.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

José Valverde at Amazon (14) (23)

QU’AS-TU FAIT, HARRY ? WHAT’VE YOU DONE, HARRY?

UNE AVENTURE BILINGUE DANS NOTRE PASSÉ FONDATEUR

WHAT’VE YOU DONE, HARRY? QU’AS-TU FAIT, HARRY ?

A BILINGUAL EDITION IN OUR FOUNDING PAST

Vanessa Chevallier at Amazon.fr (33)

L’ENFANT DE LA COLÈRE

Vanessa CHEVALLIER

José Valverde @ self-edition (34)

POURQUOI L’ISLAM FAIT PEUR

Et réponse à Tariq Ramadan

Par José Valverde

Jean de Patmos at Amazon.fr (37)

Jean de Patmos

L’Apocalypse de

Jésus Christ

Atelier de Grec Biblique du Diocèse de Poitiers

 Traduction :

Ingrid Auriol, Katy Breuil, Michel Caubet,

Jean Couprie,  Jacques Lefebvre, Odile de Loynes.

Illustrations Annunzio Coulardeau