L'enfant et les sortilèges: Dream or Reality?

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.

Towards a Production of L'enfant et les sortilèges

This year the greater part of our university's opera production will be Maurice Ravel and Colette's 1925 opera L'enfant et les sortilèges. As part of their coursework, the students in the cast have to write a journal documenting their experiences with preparation, rehearsals, and performance, and in the spirit of solidarity I am going to do the same as I prepare to direct the opera.

My directing experience heretofore has consisted of two productions of opera scenes and a few short one-off projects. This is the first full-length (albeit only 50 minutes), fully-staged opera I will have directed, and it is not a nice and easy one with which to start. Here is an opera that, in addition to being quite musically challenging, is full of various kinds of phantasmagoria and built-in staging demands. The opera's plot is deceptively simple: a young child disobeys his mother, and the furniture proceeds to come to life and animals begin to sing, punishing him for his misdeeds. He is thrust out of his bedroom into the garden, where the animals revolt and attack him. A squirrel is wounded in the melée and the child binds its paw, his first truly unselfish act. The animals sing a hymn to the child and his mother comes back to embrace him.

What is a director to do with living furniture, humanised animals, and a magical garden? On a big budget in a big theatre the opera is a great opportunity for creative stage and costume designers to pull out all the stops. Since its premiere it has attracted big names in design, perhaps most impressively a 1981 production designed by David Hockney for the Metropolitan Opera. A quick trawl through YouTube will show huge set pieces, elaborate animations, full choruses and corps de ballet, and extravagant costumes. Suffice it to say that our budget is not very close to that of the Met, and our Music Theatre isn't quite as big (150 seats vs. 3800). So how to manage this spectacle without all of these trappings? Is it even desirable or possible? Why not choose an easier opera? Each opera will have its own challenges, so L'Enfant is not particularly unusual in that respect, and it is one of the few operas with a large cast (and many female roles, always a challenge at opera schools). A major advantage of having to strip away all of the extravagant accoutrements is that the music and the text can come through more clearly. Ravel's score (and Colette's libretto) is a model of musical and theatrical economy; they stuff more into these 50 minutes than seems possible, yet every moment rings true and no character or event feels short-changed. This also makes it an ideal opera for a fairly large group of young singers: everyone gets something fun and challenging to do, without overtaxing any particular singer. A staging needs to be found that will add visual interest while not overwhelming the music. I see my duties as a university opera director as more than just visual, however. As part of a teaching institution, a production needs to be a learning experience for all involved. It needs to shed some new light on the work, or make the audience and performers understand it in a different way. Our 2015 production set a variety of opera scenes in 1940s Hollywood, a concept I used to demonstrate how close the genres of opera and cinema are, especially in the age of the 'studio system'. By the 1940s cinema had taken the place within society that opera had held until the early twentieth century, and I hoped to show that opera could and should be entertaining and enlightening in the same way as films of this period were. Last year I set our scenes in a 1950s diner, to bring out the community aspect of opera: many operas feature meeting-places that hold similar roles to that of the diner in the 1950s. Choosing a specific time was also a way to bind very disparate scenes together, and afforded some tongue-in-cheek connections to be made (I think the idea I'm most proud of was to stage the Brindisi from La Traviata as a 1950s Coca-Cola commercial).

But producing a full opera requires a somewhat different approach from doing scenes. If the scenes are to come together as a coherent evening, some general unifying concept needs to be imposed on them from above. Otherwise you have a meaningless variety show (I should say that many opera schools do just this, and successfully, but it seems to me that the grab-bag approach is too performer-directed rather than audience-directed; even in a university opera is a public art form that needs to earn its audience, so any director has a duty to present something cohesive and not just an academic exercise). For a single opera, the concept needs to come from within, otherwise you end up with the worst kind of Regietheater, where the opera is subjugated to the whim of a director's personality. Even with scenes I start by asking, 'what does this opera say to me?', not 'how do I use this opera to convey my ideas about XYZ?'

I'll now try to take you through my thought process of how I got to the central concept of the production I'm planning for L'Enfant. First comes the question, what does L'Enfant say to me? I see a very dark, mysterious work, not at all a 'safe' fairy tale. Even though the ending is happy (the child reunited with his mother) and there are moments of humour along the way, the general mood is of unease and danger. This starts right from the very beginning, as Ravel writes an undulating sequence of parallel fourths and fifths underlined by a dissonant bass line. There is little sense of solid tonality here. There are analogues to be found in early Disney movies: the scary forest escape and transformation of the Queen in Snow White, the transformation of the boys into donkeys in Pinocchio, the pink elephants in Dumbo, the death of the mother in Bambi, the mad libidinousness of The Three Caballeros. The Disney artists of the late 1930s-early 1940s were much more willing to look at the dark dimensions of childhood than their latter-day analogues. This opera is a trip into a child's nightmare, not a  (whether it is literally a nightmare or some sort of objective reality is a question I will return to in a subsequent entry).

So it's going to be dark. But that doesn't really get me very far. Next I think about the time in which the opera was written (this is the musicologist talking: we always look at texts historically and culturally). It premiered in 1925, and Colette first sent Ravel the libretto around 1917. Generally speaking, we're in post-First World War France. This is an extremely exciting period, and it makes sense that the production could be set during it. The music is full of references to other types of music of the time, including music-hall numbers and fox-trots. There is nothing at all original about setting an opera in the time it was written, and one of my favourite directors and major inspirations, Robert Carsen, often takes this route. But any kind of textbook approach to the early 1920s would be misguided as this is definitely not a 'realist' opera, full as it is of living furniture and talking animals. What is the opposite of realism but surrealism, and when was surrealism being developed? The early 1920s! Taking a surrealist approach does not mean that I think Ravel and Colette wrote a surrealist opera: neither showed much interest in the surrealist movement (or the Dada movement out of which it came), and the goal of this opera is not to 'épater les bourgeois' but rather to bring them enjoyment. But the temporal proximity is too good to pass up, and had the early surrealists been less snobbish about such bourgeois entertainment as opera they would have found a lot to like: living inanimate objects of course, but also a general interest in dreams, made-up cat language, and incorporations of wildly different musical and poetic styles.

How then to translate the language of 1920s surrealism onto our limited stage, in a way that makes sense to an audience and that doesn't overwhelm the text? Another project led me (somewhat roundaboutly) to a way in: I've been slowly chipping away at a book idea about 1950s film music and acting, and my studies of film led me into photography of that decade (Richard Avedon in particular, with his brilliant capturing of actors), which piqued my interest and led me further back in time. I latched on to 1920s photography, especially by Man Ray and André Kertesz, as a visual way in, and thought that using photographs as scenic elements would be a creative and cost-effective way to avoid a big cumbersome set (much as I liked our diner set last year, it was rather cumbersome and I wanted to avoid that this year). What attracted me to Ray and Kertesz is that they both take familiar objects and defamiliarise them through use of unusual angles or even modifications of the photographic process. Ravel and Colette do something similar in the opera, showing us hitherto unexplored dimensions of teacups, wallpaper, cats, insects, etc. I still need to continue developing the visual aspect, but I plan to have a large frame centre stage on which to project the photographs, and possibly two smaller frames on either side. Costumes are to be simple, with basic 1920s forms that can be accented with elements that reference the things/animals the singers represent.

With the basic structure in place, we can soon finalise casting of the opera and I can work on developing it further. Because I already know the singers involved, it will be easier to plan the specific aspects of the production around them. It will help knowing who is singing which role, as this will allow me to more effectively visualise the production before we begin rehearsals. The next idea to work out is an important and difficult one: are the events of the opera happening in the child's dream, or do they have an objective reality? This is the question I will return to in the next entry.