CRITIQUE – In Offenbach and the three emperorshis new play at the Théâtre de Poche, Christophe Barbier returns in music to the life of the German composer. A melodic biography which also allows the political columnist to wink at current events.
In this year 1867, the rumor is circulating in Paris that three emperors, coming to France for the Universal Exhibition, will compress their majesties in the only Café Anglais, for a dinner without historical precedent. But will the sixteen dishes and eight wines that await them be enough to satisfy them? Concerned, the Minister of the Interior summons the man in view of the Parisian show: the composer Jacques Offenbach, master of the operetta with 640 works, so that he produces the best of his art in front of these prestigious guests, until snatch one from them: «Vive l’Empire, vive la France». At least, 150 years later (but don’t we say that politics must reconnect with the long term?), this is the solution that Christophe Barbier imagines for Place Beauvau, in the staging of his new play at the Pocket Theater: Offenbach and the three emperors.
In the evening, this stubborn commentator on political life leaves the television sets for the stage, the red scarf for the gray jacket and the Elysian exegesis for the gallant song. The event of the imperial delegation serves as a pretext for a return to the life and work of Offenbach, which he plays alongside Pauline Courtin playing the diva Hortense Schneider and Vadim Sher as the curiously music-loving Alexander II. In a setting that evokes the Parisian restaurants of the Second Empire, the trio sings nearly twenty tunes, accompanied by the piano, among the most famous by the German composer.
Christophe Barbier reveals himself as a singer, dancer, hallucinatory insect, in a word, a man-orchestra enthusiastic by his spiritual complicity with the composer. One passage in particular sheds light on their relationship: Barbier-Offenbach is asked the reasons for his success and the source of his passion for writing; he answers that he seeks to satisfy the desires for joy of Parisians, tired of institutional authors suffering from a curious Croesus disease: every subject they touch becomes not golden, but standardized, following melodramatic imperatives. As Offenbach laughed at the artistic productions of his time, Barbier takes the opposite view of contemporary biopics in which existence is no longer conceived as a pendulum, which we guess is lucrative, oscillating between pain and sorrow. Their plot follows the same pattern: things are bad, and things don’t get better. We speculate on the exchange rate of destiny in tragedy. None of this in Offenbach, whose music is like the sparkling of champagne bubbles, where love lasts only for the time of playful intoxication, where existence is lightened from its weight of necessity, where even true misfortune turns into smiling regret.
But, and this is the other aspect of Offenbach and the other aspect of this play, the lightness is coupled with political satire. When our politicians like to present themselves as severe stoics concerned only with the general interest, the role of passions in the conduct of the kingdom is highlighted here. If the German composer suits Christophe Barbier so much, it is also because the court intrigues which Offenbach made the subject of his works have been commented on by the political columnist for thirty years. Because in opera buffa, the masters of the world are led by socialites, and the biggest decisions depend on the smallest keyholes; Offenbach, it is Labiche who would paint the morals of Olympus. We return to the spirit of Greek mythology, far from lamentations and heroic exploits, where the difference between the god and the great of this world is analogous to that which separates the great himself from the common man: it lies in the magnitude of the calamities spread by the harness of his desire, and by the loosening of his bridle. The Frenchman, who is only too familiar with the slump into which his president has plunged him, does not take long to recognize models in these inhabitants of the clouds: there is not far from Jupiter to Jupiter.
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Another lesson that Offenbach and Barbier give us: we can plead the feminine cause intelligently. This show highlights the singer Hortense Schneider, a little-known figure, although largely responsible for Offenbach’s success: she is independent and free as are the women in his plays, whether they are “daughters of Jupiter or girls of joy”while men are slaves to the desires they inspire. We could add: and ideologies decreed by the sad modern muses. History sagging, Offenbach and the three emperors it could be in 150 years Thomas Jolly and the three prime ministers : to decree that all three of them are French, a director would even find the unity of time more or less respected.
At the end of Christophe Barbier’s play, a protagonist laments (as one laments in Offenbach, to music and with a smile on his face): “Why do you have to be gray to see life in pink?” And the spectator goes home with this thought: perhaps theater and music are the only ones to provide sober intoxication, perhaps they are the only artificial paradises from which one does not fall, but lands.
