Haemon will therefore be saved! The world premiere of the opera Zad Moultaka within the framework of the Arsmondo festival of the Opéra national du Rhin was able to continue, thanks once again to the resilience and self-sacrifice of all the artists involved. France Musique also responded present and broadcast live this world creation (available for replay here). In the hall, the staging has disappeared, swallowed up by the need for space to respect the physical distance necessary for the safety of each of the protagonists: the orchestra is spread out over the entire stage, the proscenium welcomes the conductor and the singers and the hall sees the members of the choir scattered in the rows of armchairs – the libretto foresees them grouped in the corridors.
© Klara Beck / Rhine National Opera-
Haemon is therefore safe and this is the aesthetic stake of the libretto. Taking up the oh so tragic myth ofAntigone, Paul Audi, shifts the gaze on his promised, Hémon, sacrificed between the intransigence of the father (Creon) and the relentlessness of the daughter of Oedipus. Sophocles only concedes to the young first a scene where he appears helpless, thus highlighting the will of the father, fueled by this Destiny which will crush all the characters. Under the librettist’s pen, Destiny disappears and it is indeed humans and their balance of power that are the driving force behind the actions and feelings of the characters. The outcome will therefore not be tragic but rather epiphanic. In his last tirade, Haemon understands that it is fragility that has pushed his whole family to its limits: “Oedipus, in your blindness, you will have been more fragile than deceived. […] and I, the last of this line, feel all the fragility of my withdrawal. Haemon renounces the throne left vacant by the abdication of his father, thus ridding Thebes of this cursed family.
Formally, the composition of Zad Moultaka is in a middle ground. Bassem Akiki scrupulously ensures that these aesthetics are respected. The chorus is mostly treated like that of a Greek tragedy. Offstage, he chants and punctuates the advance of conflicts until he cuts the Gordian knot when he bursts onto the stage after the discovery of Antigone’s lifeless body. Each character is assigned a specific style within his range. This style draws a psychology without locking it in there: Antigone, in a very tense line, leans towards hysteria; Euridyce, who alternates between declamations, timbre / detimbrées notes and song, wanders in the musical fabric like a lost mother; Créon could be a high priest of Saint-Saëns! The reciters who tell of Haemon’s exile and Eurydice’s madness immediately evoke the maids ofElektra by Strauss, between mockery and story. Haemon, distributed to Raffaele Pe, sings all his scenes except the last in a baritone range where only a few punctuation calls for his countertenor register. His last monologue, in countertenor, materializes the awareness and the dramatic outcome.
The orchestral material rests on the string desks. They swell and disintegrate according to the tensions of the libretto while brass, harps and percussions punctuate, comment or redouble the vocal line (one also thinks of Stravinsky during certain transitions). From the middle of the work, this material, classic in contemporary music as well as in the treatment of the theater, expands through the confrontations to find a new prosodic truth.
The choir of the Opéra du Rhin is of irreproachable rhythmic precision despite its indoor layout. Geoffroy Buffière endows Dean Hyllos with all the necessary wisdom thanks to a dark and rounded voice, particularly well projected. Beatrice Uria-Monzon finds in Eurydice a good use of mezzo which she serves with integrity and virtuosity in all this first part where she must speak as much as sing. Judith Fa | has a lot to do with the high-pitched swerves that Antigone has in store for it. She accomplishes them with a grace as surgical as her timbre is fruity. Tassis Christoyannis sits the authoritarian arrogance of Creon in a few lines before splitting the armor and the marble of his stamp in front of the madness of Eurydice. On the contrary, Raffaele Pe succeeds in a tour de force, that of bringing his character, a weak and fragile hero, to the image of the cold color of his baritone voice whose projection is after all limited, in front of the other singers and orchestral blisters. It is in this ambivalence between two tessitures that he embodies a disturbance rich in meaning.
–
