by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I came home from dinner and I announced that our
movie selection would be, in the immortal words of Monty Python, “something
completely different.” It turned out to be a download of a modern opera called Orfeo
& Majnun (given the multilingual and
multicultural nature of the production — more on that later — I’m not sure
which of the three languages used that “&” should be translated into!)
which was produced by the Theatre La Monnaie in Brussels and was the culmination
of several months’ worth of events, some of them open to public participation,
built around the themes of desire and longing and in particular about two
mythic couples who lost each other through forces beyond their control. One,
Orpheus and Eurydice, you’ve almost certainly heard about: Orpheus was the
master musician of ancient Greece who became engaged to Eurydice, only she died
suddenly the day before their scheduled wedding. Orpheus charmed Hades, the
Greek god of death (and also the name for the physical underground afterlife
the ancient Greeks believed they were going to when they croaked —
interestingly the Greeks did not,
as the Abrahamic religions did, posit two afterlives, a pleasant one for the “good” people and a highly nasty
one of eternal suffering for the “bad” people), into letting him descend into
the kingdom of the dead and bring Eurydice back to Earth and to normal life.
Only Hades told him that he was not
supposed to look back at her when they made the journey from the underworld to
Earth, and when he did so she immediately disappeared from his sight and died
permanently. This legend, especially given that the hero was a musician and
singer, was a “natural” for the early opera composers, and while Carlo
Gagliano’s La Dafne from 1600 is
the earliest opera known to exist, it is the L’Orfeo of
Claudio Monteverdi from 1607 that is the earliest opera actually in the
modern repertory. The other story they drew on for this production is more
obscure — frankly, before this I’d only heard of it as the basis of Eric
Clapton’s song “Layla” — a Bedouin Arab story about the well-born Layla al-Aamiriya and her lover, the penniless poet Qays
ibn al-Mulawwah. Unfortunately, Layla’s dad didn’t want her to “marry down” and
so he arranged for her to marry an upper-class guy, and Qays became so obsessed
with her he stalked her and wrote poems to her, being so aggressive in his
pursuit he acquired the nickname “Majnun” (literally the Arabic for “crazy,”
though since the Majnun and Leyla story became popular it’s come to mean
specifically someone made crazy by frustrated love. Though the basic story is
Arabic in origin, the most famous literary treatment of it (and the one that
“froze” its details for future writers and scholars much the way Bram Stoker’s Dracula did for
European vampire mythology) was a 12th century poetic novel by
Persian writer Niẓāmi Ganjavi.
The Theatre La Monnaie’s
presentation of Layla & Majnun
involved three composers — Moneim Adwan, Howard Moody and Dick van der Horst —
though only one credited librettist, Martina Winkel, and with Airan Berg in
overall artistic charge of the work. It also involved three languages: a
narrator (Sachii Gholamalizad) and chorus sing in French, while Orpheus (the
quite hunky Yoann Dubruque) and Eurydice (Judith Fa) sing in English — I guess
there aren’t that many singers out there trained to sing in classical Greek —
and Majnun (Loay Srouji) and Layla (Nai Barghouti) sing in what I presume is
Arabic (though given the story’s detour into 12th century Persia it
might have been Farsi). Throughout the performance I kept thinking of the Fanfare magazine critic who wrote that if modern-day opera
producers and directors want to create productions that deal with modern-day
social, political and psychological issues, they should commission new works
with those concerns built-in rather than attempting to tweak old operas to
include such themes, violating the original intentions of composers and
librettists. Orfeo & Majnun
seemed like a successful effort to do just that — to take the age-old dramatic
themes of love and desire and create a work rooted in operatic tradition but
also fully contemporary and with a sense that the production is communicating
what the work’s creators intended instead of some directorial agenda grafted on
decades or centuries after the piece was originally written. It also offered an
interesting insight into the surprising similarity between Western-style
coloratura composition and traditional Arabic music, especially the way both
call on singers to do extensive ornamentation over many notes on a single
vowel.
The performance dragged in places, and one element — the crude puppets
(with their human manipulators clearly visible on stage) used to denote the
animals that figure in the tale — seemed almost risible, but for the most part
I was impressed. Charles complained that Judith Fa and Nai Barghouti looked too
similar — Barghouti was shorter, stouter and bushier-haired, but they were not
only similar “types,” they were both wearing white dresses and Charles thought
the producers should have costumed them in different colors so we could tell
them apart before they started singing and we noted which language they were
singing in. It didn’t help that La Monnaie was performing this in an outdoor
venue and as a result the singers had to wear microphones stuck to their cheeks
that looked like tumors until you realized what they were — but I liked the
production overall. No doubt I’d have liked it even better if it had come with
English subtitles (it was subtitled in French) — even the parts that were in
English were only sporadically comprehensible (a problem with coloratura music
in general — though I still remember the 1959 broadcast recording of Handel’s Rodelinda in English in which Joan Sutherland was her usual
mush-mouthed self and Janet Baker, in a supporting role, had excellent and
vividly clear English diction) — but Orfeo & Majnun is a quite compelling new opera and I hope it has
sufficient “legs” to be given more stagings, hopefully with the choral parts
and the narration performed in the native language of the country where it’s
being performed (much the way Stravinsky composed Oedipus Rex in Latin but specified that the narration be in the
language of the country where it’s being performed).
