Here is opera production journal part two! Danger: Freud ahead.
At the moment I am working on a translation on the libretto and a transcription into IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet, which our students use to help them with singing in foreign languages). Paying close attention to every word and phoneme is a good way to study the libretto in depth, and the more I look at Colette's work the more I am impressed by it. It is not merely a vehicle for Ravel's music but a rich text on its own, full of ambiguities, comic lines, and colourful turns of phrase, to which Ravel responded with unceasing invention. I had never really thought of Ravel as a great text-setter, but looking at his other vocal works having now studied this opera I can see that he is one of the best. Take the scene between the Child and the Princess as an example: the Princess uses a very elegant poetic style, with long sentences set to an undulating solo flute line, and the Child responds with short bursts over a more turbulent orchestral accompaniment (we'll just have piano and flute in our version). 'Qui sait si le malin enchanteur/ Ne va pas me rendre au sommeil de la mort,/ Ou bien me dissoudre en nuée?' ('Who knows if the evil enchanter will render me up to the sleep of death, or even dissolve me into a cloud?') vs. the Child's brusque 'Ne t'en va pas! Reste! Dis-moi...' (Do not go! Stay! Tell me...').
After emerging from the pages of the book of fairy tales the Child destroyed, the Princess introduces herself as the 'Princesse enchantée, celle que tu appelais dans ton songe la nuit passée', the Princess you called to in your dreams last night. This opens up the important question of whether the events of the opera are happening within a dream, or if they have some kind of objective reality. Are the enchantments the Child sees products of his imagination, or are they representations of mysterious uncanny forces acting upon him from the outside? As it premiered in 1925, it is not surprising that much of the early criticism of the opera is Freudian: the whole opera was seen by many critics as a psychological case-study. Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein read the opera (without having seen it or even looked at the score) as a study of the absent Father. This is a compelling reading, as a father is never seen or mentioned, but Klein sees his sublimated presence everywhere. All of the enchanted objects and happenings can be seen as Oedipal manifestations, mostly phallic: the child has taken out the clock's pendulum and has pulled the cat's tail. The mother and mother-figures are most prominent as signs of order and love, in particular the Princess and the Squirrel who sings of forgiveness. The father-figures represent chaos and/or oppression: destroyed objects, animal riots, cages. A Freudian like Klein would read the opera as a dream, specifically Colette and Ravel's dream, but this kind of autobiographical criticism has (for the most part justly) fallen out of favour today. Artists don't always have to produce expressions of their psyches, and are just as capable of putting on a persona for a given work as performers are of becoming someone else when they perform it (pace Lee Strasberg). Freudianism is essentially Romantic in spite of some Modernist trappings, but Ravel is a quintessential ironic Modernist. There is little in his (or Colette's) other work to indicate much interest in Freudianism or even dreams more generally.
This all leads to me think that the events of the opera are indeed happening in reality, albeit a heightened, fantastic reality. This reading seems rather more interesting to me than explaining it all away as a dream, which I've always found somewhat of a cop-out. The Oz books are narratively superior to the 1939 MGM film because Dorothy really does go to Oz; her trip isn't just a dreamy metaphor for the values of home but is a real experience. Ravel's opera sometimes has a similar ethos to the Oz books (or, perhaps more, Alice in Wonderland, though Lewis Carroll sold himself short by making Alice's adventures 'just a dream'). Rather than seeing it all as a dream, we could try the opposite: the Child has been figuratively asleep, unaware of the world around him, and the opera represents his awakening.
The Princess's sequence is central here, but playing with an interpretation that the opera represents awakening means we need to read her in quite a different way than as a Freudian mother-figure. She calls to the Child to rescue her from being pulled back into the land of night and sleep, that is, into his dream-time subconscious. She wants to break free of being a character in his childish fantasy (his dream). The Princess is a dream character who has come to life, insisting that the dreamer engage with her as a real figure. On the surface she is beautiful (as the fairy tale come to life) but really she is monstrous, a figure lost between dream and reality, suddenly making demands in waking life, a character out of Buñuel and Dalí's Un Chien Andalou or Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête. She does not want the Child to grow up; by calling on him to 'rescue' her she is really trying to enforce his childish dream-world onto his waking life. I suspect that if the Child were able to hold onto her longer, instead of pulling the Princess out she would have pulled him in with her. We could read the rest of the fantastic characters in the opera in a similar way: the animals and furniture cease being passive objects of the child's fantasy destruction and enter his waking life, although many of them offer him more positively-framed lessons in compassion than the negative temptation offered by the Princess. Far from being a representation of the dream, the opera demonstrates what happens when the dream starts to pervade reality, leading eventually to disenchantment and growing up if the lessons of the slippage are heeded. Woody Allen took a lighter (but just as profound) approach to this idea in his 1985 film The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which Celia, a depressed 1930s housewife, wills the romantic lead of her favourite movie off of the screen and into her life. The cinema is Celia's place in which to dream, and over the course of the film she learns that she must face reality and cannot count on her dream-prince to rescue her. This blurring of dream and reality provides another link to the avant-garde arts of the 1920s and 30s: surrealists and expressionists alike were interested in this slippage between dream and reality that the opera represents so well.
The Princess, then, is really a cautionary figure. Far from being a protective mother substitute, she represents regression and fantasy rather than progression and reality, almost a false/negative mother figure, essentially calling the Child back into the womb ('land of night and sleep') rather than sending her offspring out into the real world. The Child's real mother, who we meet at the beginning of the opera when she punishes the Child for not heeding her, could almost be seen as setting off the phantasmagoria as a lesson: all of the things come alive to teach the Child how to get through life's temptations and hardships, teaching him to be compassionate rather than selfish. The real mother turns up again at the end of the opera (though, perhaps significantly, she doesn't sing) to offer a guiding hand to help her son grow up: the Child has successfully met the challenges of the Princess's temptation to regress and the healing of the wounded squirrel. I should note that this is still a Freudian reading, but one from a different angle: while the opera still portrays the Child's development from self-directed actions to other-directed actions (it would be difficult to argue otherwise), the role I see for the mother is different from what Klein saw. For me, she is a more positively supportive figure than she is for Klein, for whom she only has her basic Oedipal role. I find it more interesting to examine the mother as an active character with agency, guiding the Child's development, rather than merely a catalyst for the Child's lesson. I prefer to see all of the characters as having more agency than productions usually afford them. It will be more interesting for the singers (and, I hope, the audience) for all of them to have 'real' roles with their own agendas, instead of only being manifestations of the Child's ego.
The idea that the Child has learned something is supported by his aria which follows, 'Toi le cœur de la rose'. It can be read as a song of wistful regret that the book's world of fantasy is now past; he may look back on it fondly, but his inability to rescue the Princess was really his developing subconscious holding him back for his long-term good. It ends with the Child brusquely saying 'Tous ceux-ci sont des livres arides' ('all these are dry books'), an indication that he is finished with fantasy and is ready to face more difficult matter (which in the next scene turns out to be mathematics, as he is chased by an old man who personifies arithmetic spouting out math problems with incorrect answers).
When I staged the Princess sequence as part of our 2015 opera scenes production we made her a glamorous Snow White-ish figure, needing to be rescued by the Child who is, alas, not yet strong enough to be her Prince Charming. This time around, to fit with the surrealist reading and with the way I'm now starting to understand the rest of the opera, we will of course need to stage it very differently. That this opera can stand so many interpretations (including variations by the same interpreter!) is yet more evidence for how good it is. Last time the 'land of Night and Sleep' was War, fitting the 1940s milieu of the production and allowing the shepherds and shepherdesses who sing the preceding chorus to be represented as ghostly soldiers. This time the Princess herself is the dangerous figure: she tempts the Child to regress. This time around, she belongs more in the expressionist forest Snow White runs away from than in the palace.
