Staging the Ineffable: Olivier Messiaen's Saint Francois d'Assise
2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/oq/kbs031
ISSN1476-2870
Autores Tópico(s)Musicians’ Health and Performance
ResumoOlivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise is a striking exception to Carolyn Abbate's insight that “in opera, the characters pacing the stage often suffer from deafness; they do not hear the music that is the ambient fluid of their music-drowned world.”1 Messiaen's characters are just the opposite: deeply connected and highly responsive to the organic sound world of a stage work that has often and dubiously been described as “unoperatic.” The same charge has frequently been made of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande and could easily be leveled at Paul Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-bleue, both operas set to elusive texts by Maurice Maeterlinck and which Messiaen adored, repeatedly acknowledging them as models for his Saint François (he had discovered Pelléas while still a boy in Nantes, through his early teacher Jehan de Gibon, and Dukas was Messiaen's second professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire). Productions of Messiaen's opera—nine separate ones from 1983 through 2011, three of which also moved to other venues (to say nothing of numerous complete and partial concert performances), an astonishing record on the battleground of contemporary opera—stand or fall according to how seriously they take the challenges Saint François poses to the conventions of the operatic genre, not least of which is the composer's profoundly held religious belief.
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