Salzburg’s new Saint François d’Assise,
directed by Romeo Castellucci and conducted by Maxime Pascal, with Philippe Sly
in the title role, single-handedly justifies the somewhat mixed operatic
results of Markus Hinterhäuser’s now concluded intendancy. This was an event,
an experience not only of the highest, most challenging artistic order, but extended
beyond that, building to a transcendental encounter in the third act that I am
sure will remain with those who underwent, no participated in, it for the rest
of their lives. That is in large part a matter of the work, of course, Messiaen’s
avowed summa; or rather, the work was an indispensable fons et origo
for it. But the palpable ambition, commitment and – doubtless in various forms –
belief shown from all concerned were equally crucial. Taking steps, as it does,
not merely beyond the at-best wonderful, yet also too-often-infuriating aesthetic
of opera, but beyond Wagner’s renewal of Attic tragedy and Schoenberg’s theological
transformation of Wagnerian music drama, to an opera that arguably belongs less
in our opera houses even than Parsifal or Moses und Aron, and yet
in its rebuke and challenges alike to them helps justify their continued
existence and promise them new life, Saint François may be a one-off,
but it is an absolutely necessary one-off. More to the point, it felt and,
quite simply, was so here, an inspired contribution to the
eight-hundredth anniversary of St Francis’s death, as well as a crucial demonstration
of what art, religion, and humanity can and must do if they are to survive—and to
be worthy of survival.
The total commitment of Sly’s performance
in its physical extremity as well as its astounding musical range was foremost
among the wonders experienced. Call it inspiration, call it faith, call it what
you will: here was an artist responding to and creating something extraordinary—in
tandem with his fellow artists and the work itself. Lauranne Oliva’s Angel was
a voice and presence of radiant clarity, as unanswerable and unknowable as the place
from which (s)he had come. Russell Braun’s beautifully sung Brother Leo offered
a more attainable or at least approachable example, imploring and certain in
faith, ineffably human as, like the rest of the brothers, he sought the way. Willard
White’s Brother Bernard imparted a striking, equally touching voice of older
faith. All presented voices and faces of a community, a path, that connected us
to the world of saints, angels, and divinity.
The opening of Castellucci’s staging offered
a frame closer to more typical contemporary opera as anything we should proceed
to see (or hear), but quite rightly one soon forgotten, even discarded. In a
museum – yes, our museum of musical works – the young Francis was called to
leave all behind: his fine clothes, art, family (his father reappearing briefly
in the final scene, but no longer in any sense the focus) himself to begin the
route to the beyond: first beyond society, even beyond established monasticism,
and ultimately Beyond. Shedding his fine clothes, as did the historical
Francis, he was born anew, as were his followers, in a water both of baptism
and of, straightforwardly, elemental water, pouring from the ceiling and, in one
of many striking images of Castelluccian installation-drama, apparently
petrified, water emerging miraculously as if from a fountain. Brothers, singers
and dancers alike, joined him, likewise losing all, one shaved onstage, in the
promise of gaining all—through a life of obedience, prayer, belief, charity, and
art that is heavenly rather than temporal. Such is no easy path, of course, and
only Francis could truly take on the ultimate challenge, that of Christ’s Cross,
but others would participate as they could: whether in baking bread during
Lauds in onstage ovens, its unmistakeable aroma inviting us to the refectory for
physical interval sustenance; in receiving the Angel and its questions about predestination;
in accepting not only the Leper, but his leprosy as part of God’s creation, a
blow against Cathar and other heresy; in wandering, even wallowing in a mud, a
filth as far removed from Francis’s fine origins as could be imagined; and of
course with the birds and other of God’s creatures (all featured at different
points onstage: wolf (of Gubbio), bird, and sacrificial lambs, as well as
representations).
There was much more, yet nothing was
hurried, the production taking its necessary time as did the musical
performance. If some of the visual displays might have worked better,
ironically, in a museum – a giant picture, for instance, of a child regaining
the ability to hear – then many others were deeply touching, not least a
confession to which it was difficult not to assent, quasi-heretically, in
artistic communion: ‘Je t’aime, Olivier, immense artiste’. The birds in Francis’s
sermon took on new, tragic meaning when shown, both onstage as near death and
on screen in funerary naming, in reference to the ecological devastation of our
age. But for the most part, the preaching was not Castelucci’s, or ours, but
that of Francis and perhaps something lying beyond even him. This was not a
place for argument, for discussion, but for mystery and for truth. We could
recognise that more readily, however strenuous the demand, in the acceptance of
the leper (acted by an old man, apparently wasted away, yet sung and doubled already
by an angelic Sean Panikkar in white), mirrored towards the close when the latter
returned to wash Francis on his way to the beyond. The ravishing beauty
of Panikkar’s singing added further levels of theological as well as dramatic
understanding, as of course did the Vienna Philharmonic’s celestial invitation
(and those of the ondes Martenot, played by Nathalie Forget, Augustin Viard,
and Cécile Lartigau). The image of Panikkar as angelic leper emanation, to borrow
slightly from Stockhausen, kneading together Francis and physical Leper under a
cloth for them to emerge in quasi-communion, even quasi-transubstantiated, as living
counterpart to the bread whose baking (and oven steam) similarly pervaded the
Felsenreitschule, made perfect liturgical sense in the moment—a key condition,
of course, for any form of liturgical acceptance, not necessarily to be
expected out of context. Ritual lived, brought to life, and yet, as with Our Lord,
ultimately pointed to death—and thereafter resurrection.
For later, in the stigmata scene, we were
unmistakeably in the world of dark mysteries it was and could not be given to
us to understand. As with Francis, we must simply submit. A chill orchestral
wind summoned by Pascal and the orchestra both formed a foundation for and intensified
the dark images onstage, all having changed as we approached the beginning of
the end. In dance, image, and music, it might almost have been a black (or
better, dark) mass, a reminder that true sacrilege may closer approach – an
essential term here – the sacred than so much of our banal, daily lives, ‘religious’
or ‘secular’. Not everything, here as in art and religion more generally, was necessarily
to be understood or experienced representationally. Was that apparently sacramental
mound from which so much dirt and darkness came anything of the kind? Did it
summon the grave later to be dug by skeletal figures, one of them Francis? Or were
these the wrong questions to ask, evidence that we had not yet been called? Red
may have signalled blood; it may simply, joyously, agonisingly, have been red (to
synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes alike). Angel wings were surely, though, on at
least one level what they seemed to be: providing, and of Providence, something
towards which Francis, once further shorn of strength and submitted to those dark
figures (of Hell?) could reach, ultimately to join a company of Heaven that may
have been easier, or at least less impossible, for Francis’s mediaeval mind
than ours to grasp.
And yet, this is a work of modernity, a singular
version no doubt, but no less modern for that. Messiaen engaged with the newest
as well as the oldest music; he instructed many of its composers, as well as
writing it himself. Pascal left us in no doubt he head internalised this
musical language, its capabilities, and its emotions, to bring it, like Francis
– and us – to new life. Birds, for Messiaen God’s finest musicians, sang more
clearly than all, uninhibited, acting from their essence, knowing no other. This
we heard from all sections of the orchestra, gamelan-percussion in
near-surround sound included. Counterpoint and harmony mesmerised as Creation
itself returned to life. But there was more to it than that single miracle.
There was existential dread, harmonic and timbral; there was radiant, human joy;
there was a new sense of time; there was the Angel’s unearthly viol.
Ultimately, there was the coming together of all, in orchestral and choral
divine encounter, an experience so overwhelming one felt one had actually met
God. That did not happen by itself, through mere grace, for this was still art:
the work had been prepared, paced, and permitted to speak for itself in its
succession of tableaux. Its inevitability, though, was undeniable. In the
numinous, astonishing, overwhelming closing bars, instruments, creatures, alleluias,
and other songs of praise resounding, we came together as the angels had promised
Francis: poetry and music leading us, as with Bach, to God Himself. This is not
the only thing opera or art can and should do; but it felt, for many hours
after, that it might (yet) be the most important.
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