In his third opera, Bruno Mantovani tackles a controversial theme with a highly-developed feeling for drama and hypnotic intensity: the collaboration of French intellectuals with the National Socialists.

The grandson of Spanish refugees who fled from the Franco regime, Mantovani developed his artistic sensitivity with a strong political awareness of the ravages of totalitarianism. Each of his operas deals with the artist’s relationship to dictatorship: “L’Autre côté” (2006) after Alfred Kubin, takes the life of a painter in the “empire of dreams”, in which the utopia promised by the autocrat turns out to be a nightmarish deception; “Akhmatova” of 2011 portrays the darkest time in the life of the famous poetess, whose son was arrested by the Stalinist regime. With “Voyage d’automne” (a commission from the Opéra national du Capitole de Toulouse) the French composer examines a national trauma: the active compromise of men of letters with the occupying Nazis during the Second World War.

The subject and the title were inspired by a work by the historian François Dufay, which occupied and obsessed him for a good fifteen years: in autumn 1941, Goebbels invited various European delegations to receive honours from the Writers’ Congress in Weimar. Amongst these were the most prominent French authors of the day. They fell for the sirens of propaganda which told them of their part in the glory of the renewal of European literature under the auspices of Nazi Germany. Chaperoned by the Francophile Gerhard Heller, as the person responsible on the propaganda staff for publishing policy in occupied France,  Marcel Jouhandeau, Jacques Chardonne, Ramon Fernandez, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Robert Brasillach formed the central quintet of a game of intrigue in which the erotic attraction of Jouhandeau, a notorious homosexual, wooed Heller and the poet-soldier Hans Baumann with the sad emotions of their colleagues, with pride and vanity, nihilism and self-loathing, antisemitism and fascism.

The libretto, written by the Germanist and philosopher Dorian Astor, is freed from the only historic givens to create a tragi-comic world where the fool’s bargain is raised to the phantasmagorical dimensions of a grand, icy illusionist theatre. Nourished by the writings of these stylish bastards, the poetic and sharp language is served by a meticulous prosody and a vocal line whose lyrical outbirsts shatter into fragments under the pressure of a leaden atmosphere. The German poetry equally exerts its fascination on the libretto: on the horizon of damnation, sublime choral pages make Stefan George’s apocalyptic poem “L’Antéchrist” (“Der Widerchrist”) audible; at the point of redemption, a shattering elegy by Gertrud Kolmar, who was murdered in Auschwitz, is entrusted to the allegorical figure of “Die Sinnende”, a faint messianic shimmer of hope in the midst of the darkness. Through his interventions, a sumptuous song for soprano and orchestra is gradually developed, without doubt one of the musical high points of the opera. 
And it is precisely in the orchestral writing that Mantovani finds his most profound inspiration. In the format of Mozart (to which the piano and accordion are added), the orchestra is the principal protagonist of this “Voyage d’automne”: it conveys the lyricism, the vector of meaning and colour, it has its own autonomy. It was originally by writing musical interludes which allowed the composer to penetrate the poetic universe of the libretto and to conceive his opera like a vast dramatic symphony. The texture, more transparent than in Akhmatova, was specially conceived for the prestigious Orchestre national du Capitole de Toulouse, which Mantovani knows well, having lived there for a long time as conductor and composer. Voyage d’automne is witness to the remarkable maturity achieved by a composer who, with this work, will assuredly make his mark in a single stroke on the history of contemporary opera.

Valérie Alric (translation: Elizabeth Robinson / from [t]akte 2/2024)