the essential
The trip to Germany in 1941 by seven collaborative writers feeds the intrigue of the opera “Autumn Journey”, composed by Bruno Mantovani and presented on Friday, as a world premiere at the Théâtre du Capitole. Meeting with the playwright Dorian Astor who signed the libretto.
Some of the most beautiful male voices on the current opera scene: Pierre-Yves Pruvot, Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, Vincent Le Texier… embody the most despicable French writers such as Marcel Jouhandeau, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Robert Brasillach in ” Autumn Journey” at the Capitole theater.
How did the idea of making an opera of this frightening episode in our contemporary history come about?
Dorian Astor: This opera project was born from a long friendship between Bruno Mantovani, the composer, and Christophe Ghristi, the artistic director of the Théâtre du Capitole. In 2011, he was the librettist for “Akhmatova”, the second opera by Bruno Mantovani about this immense Soviet poet who already evoked the relationship of artists to totalitarian power under Stalin. In his research work, the composer came across a text by François Dufay, “Le Voyage d’Automne” which relates the trip in the fall of 1941 of seven French writers to Germany, at the invitation of Goebbels and the Ministry of Propaganda to flatter and actually bring the European Intelligentsia into line. At the time, he already had the presentiment that this historic episode could be the subject of an opera.
How did you write the libretto to make it into an opera?
Appointed playwright of the Opéra national du Capitole, in 2020, Christophe Ghristi entrusted me with the libretto for “Voyage d’Automne”. “The question was how to transform a historical episode into an opera. It needed dramaturgy but also a historical and at the same time psychological, theatrical interest. I therefore proposed this libretto which is a very bitter comedy about characters who are blinded by their vanity and who think they are the greatest writers of their time because of being received by the regime of the victors. They therefore neither saw nor wanted to see the horror of the Nazi regime and they came back saying that. Germany is wonderful. This provides the material for this tragicomic fool’s game, of characters bloated with vanity, ridiculous, comic and abject at the same time.
On what grounds is the plot built?
The main character of our fiction Marcel Jouhandeau kept a notebook called “The Secret Journey”. It turns out that Jouhandeau, who was married but was an avowed homosexual, fell in love with Gerhard Heller, the head of censorship of French literature who accompanied these writers to Germany. So we had a real romantic intrigue there with this Jouhandeau who is around fifty years old and who has adolescent emotions completely out of place in relation to the situation. We play on that too.
How can we not magnify the point?
To the extent that it is an opera and that the music, the singing, sublimate the situations, we looked for a way to show the ugliness, the abjection, the evil. The idea is of course not to be complacent but to denounce something. We therefore created a phantasmagoria, a bit nightmarish, which little by little moves away from reality. The culmination of this and I hold it very dear is the invention of the only female character in the middle of three Nazis and five collaborators. She was called the Dreamer, an allegorical character who represents exterminated humanity. She is a woman, Jewish, innocent and she appears several times in the work singing in German a poem by Gertrud Kolmar, a Jewish Berlin poet, who died in Auschwitz. In 1938, she wrote a sublime poem “La Songeuse”, the only glimmer of hope and purity in this opera.
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You were also inspired by the myth of Faust…
To make it an opera, we also wanted to reinterpret the myth of Faust with the great novel by Tomas Mann called “Doctor Faustus” as a model. It’s the story of a musician who makes a deal with the devil to become great. Jouhandeau is this Faust who plays with fire and this Gerhard Heller with whom he is in love is a bit like his Mephisto who will throw him to the edge of the abyss.
Why do several meetings accompany the performances?
We have set up a certain number of meetings and conferences for this opera to support the public on a subject which is not trivial. Preludes which are introductions to the work will take place in the theater 45 minutes before each performance. We work in our modest way towards a duty of memory.
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