Autumn 1941. A handful of French writers on a station platform in Paris. Cornaqués by the German officer Gerhard Heller (1909-1982), responsible for literary matters of the Propagandastaffel (“propaganda squadron”), Marcel Jouhandeau, Jacques Chardonne and Ramon Fernandez, among the most prominent writers under the Occupation, went to the Weimar Poetic Meetings where they were invited by the Dr Goebbels (here his fictional double, Wolfgang Göbst) to decide to “the literature of Europe to come”. They will be joined on the road – Heidelberg, Augsburg, Munich, then Nuremberg, Bayreuth, Jena, finally Weimar – by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Robert Brasillach.
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After The Other Side, created in 2006, then Akhmatovain 2011 at the Paris Opera, the world premiere of Bruno Mantovani’s third opera, Autumn trippresented at the Théâtre national du Capitole in Toulouse, continues to question artistic creation in the context of a dictatorship. If the first two opuses invoke figures of resistance – the Austrian engraver Alfred Kubin, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova – this time the French composer denounces those of collaboration. It is this descent into hell that librettist Dorian Astor relates, based on the eponymous book by historian François Dufay, published by Plon in 2000. A veritable Faustian pact without redemption – Goethe’s Mephisto obviously serves as a common thread for this parable of evil which leaves the listener with the impression of having witnessed, on this Friday, November 22, the birth of a masterpiece.
A dark set, showing travelers in hats and overcoats, a few train seats. Hanging from the hangers, a mineral decoration overwhelming the space: a large square slab, from which a circle of stone placed on the ground stands out. In turn conference table, political platform and place of fornication, it will disappear, not without having been covered with a blue-white-brown flag, discovering in the excavated earth the horror of a pit.
Coal plumes from locomotives, smoke from crematoria, sheets of fog pierced by beams of light: nothing explicit will be shown. Marie Lambert-Le Bihan’s refined staging draws its strength from a suggestion, monstrous and poetic at the same time. Only the relationship of homosexual fascination between Marcel Jouhandeau and Gerhard Heller draws an erotic trajectory unfolding in a gigantic crumpled white page.
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