With the “Chants de Maldoror” Isidore Ducasse, alias Lautréamont, created a figure of absolute evil. In his opera MALDOROR for the Munich Biennale, Philipp Maintz places the conflict between the poet and the monster he created at the centre of the action.
“His soul burned. He discovered the hell in us, the hell which we are, the hell of the existentialists. Before him, the hell of the literates had been a non-human stage located in the underworld, built from the scenery of horror. (…) Lautréamont’s hell was not hypothetical, it needed no scenery, it was his being, his life and the boundless ocean of his thought and the power of his words” (Wolfgang Koeppen). Isidore Ducasse, who was born in 1846 in Montevideo and came to Paris at the age of 17, is regarded as the “grandfather of surrealism”. Totally cut off from public literary life, the young man worked under the pseudonym of Lautréamont on his Chants de Maldoror for five years; it is a novel with an oscillating abundance of images, whose grotesque intellectual world is beyond compare, and which extends from the female shark with which Maldoror copulates to the hair of God, which is found in a brothel. It first brought the author fame in the 20th century, as a “black, shattered archangel of indescribable beauty” (Maurice Maeterlinck).
“For me it was clear from the beginning that this opera had to be a highly artificial construction and has a certain hermetic. Whilst working on the music, a cool blue colour predominated in my emotions. Naturally, a great attraction lay in finding a form for the content which had a scarcely surpassed brutality, but turned out to be linguistically unbelievably elegant. In my imagination, that was only possible in an abstract-artificial framework” (Philipp Maintz).
How does a subject, which portrays an excessive abundance of images of the horrible and repulsive, lend itself to being staged, and furthermore in the “beautiful” art form of opera?
Staging evil
Philipp Maintz and his librettist Thomas Fiedler create a tension-filled situation: with Maldoror, the poet Lautréamont (who is in turn an invention of Ducasse) creates a figure who embodies absolute evil. Maldoror bears characteristics of Mephisto, the erl-king or other figures who exist in literature as demons, seducers and destroyers. Lautréamont is increasingly dominated by his figure and finally destroyed. At the moment when he wants to free himself from Maldoror, he is murdered by him.
A narrative instance exists in the Chants de Maldoror which Fiedler and Maintz personify in a “voix de soprano”. In their imagination, she floats “on a swing, as in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, above the scenery” and ultimately comments to herself on the action as an outsider. It is also she who gives voice to the central ocean hymn in which the events are set out: the ocean as the inscrutable eternal instance opposed to human nature. The picture of two lovers who fall out with each other over something trivial anticipates the game of attraction and rejection between Lautréamont and Maldoror. “The ocean hymn is the supporting layer, like the primeval slime, from which the figures emerge”, says librettist Thomas Fiedler. The main plot is juxtaposed with the story of a family in three internal scenes in which evil is exemplified: a child in the Tuileries Park is first haunted by Maldoror and finally, unnoticed by its parents who are lost in prayer, murdered at home. “In this plot, the theme of morality which is the basis of the entire subject matter, which is ultimately concerned with the question of theodicy, explains by using a story which portrays the encounter with evil in the most highly sensitive way. There is scarcely any greater crime than an assault on the innocence of a child” (Thomas Fiedler).
Clear signals
The opera deals with the abundance of images and loose arrangement of the novel with a compellingly conceived form and comprehensible story. The musical form also aims to paint a clear picture. The first scene is devoted to the creation of the double figure of Lautréamont/Maldoror; following this, scenes 3 and 5 illustrate the intertwining of fascination and the power struggle of the two figures, culminating in the seventh and last scene in the murder of Lautréamont. These scenes are musically structured to achieve sensuality of sound and abundance; the breadth and depth of the ocean is portrayed in the foundations of the orchestra. Lautréamont’s part begins spoken. “In the opera, spoken sections have the tone of the untouched. Lautréamont’s role only gradually changes into song, to the extent in which he himself steps into his story, becomes part of the world which he has created, and which spirals into madness. The child’s part is also almost entirely spoken” (Maintz).
The story within the story of the afflicted family, which Philipp Maintz presents as “claustrophobic, like an idyll in a gold frame”, is restricted to chamber music; scene 4 even begins unaccompanied until Maldoror feeds the child. In exactly the same way, the voices of the parents move within a narrow framework, are stereotyped, almost eerily constricted. The only point when the child sings is one of perfidious ambiguity. In total innocence, it sings the nursery rhyme of Alouette, the lark whose head, feathers and beak are plucked out.
All this is accompanied by commentaries from the “voix de soprano”, a part with an extremely wide range up to F#’’’ which, however, “serene, always sings elegantly, and does not let itself be disturbed from its peace”. The voice remains, the poet dies, the literary figure of evil survives – rich in allusions, the open ending continues the mysterious end of the real poet Ducasse, who was found dead in his room in 1876. Following on from his work on evil, he had begun a poem about goodness in which “melancholy [was to be replaced by] courage, doubt by hope, malice by goodness, complaints by duty, scepticism by belief, sophisms by cool composure and arrogance by modesty”.
At some point in the 20th century the theory then emerged that the poet had been killed by his character. “And of Lautréamont,” as Fiedler explains, “what actually remains is precisely this: his character of Maldoror, which shows that goodness is impossible.”
Marie Luise Maintz
(from [t]akte 1/2010)
Philipp Maintz
MALDOROR. Opera in seven scenes
First performance: 27.4.2010 Munich (Biennale für Neues Musiktheater)
Aachen Symphony Orchestra, conductor: Marcus R. Bosch, director: Georges Delnon
Further performances: 29 and 30.4.2010; Theater Aachen: 8, 11, 15, 23, 27, 30.5.2010; Theater Basel: first performance: 14.10.2010
Cast: La voix de soprano (soprano), Maldoror (baritone), Lautréamont (bass-baritone), La mère (mezzo-soprano), Le père (tenor), L’enfant (child’s voice)
Orchestra: 2 (2 picc), 2 (ca), 2 b.cl, 2 (c.bsn) – 2,2,2 (t.tbn, b.tbn),1 – perc (3) – hp – pf (grand) – str
Publisher: Bärenreiter, performance material available on hire