Théâtre de l’Archevêché
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| Images: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence 2024 © Monika Rittershaus |
Samson – Jarrett Ott
Dalila – Jacquelyn Stucker
Timna – Lea Desandre
Achisch – Nahuel Di Pierro
Elon – Laurence Kilsby
Angel – Julie Roset
First Judge, Guest – Antonin Rondepierre
Samson’s mother – Andréa Ferréol
Young Samson – Gabriel Coullaud-Rosseel
Homeless person – Pascal Lifschutz
Dancers – Gal Fefferman, Theo Emil Krausz, Victoria McConnell, Manuel Meza, Rouven Pabst, Francesco Pacelli, Dan Palleg, Marion Plantey, Evie Poaros, Robin Rohrmann, Victor Villarreal, Marko Weigert
Actors – Alexandre Charlet, Arnaud Fiore, Jacky Kumanovic
Set designs – Étienne Pluss
Costumes – Ursula Kudrna
Lighting and video – Bertrand Couderc
Choreography – Sommer Ulrickson
Sound design – Mathis Nitschke
Editorial associate – Eddy Garaudel
Pygmalion
A Rameau premiere? Yes and no. In some ways, what we saw and heard was more extraordinary than that: the resurrection of Rameau’s lost Voltaire opera, Samson of 1733. Envisaged by Voltaire as the work to reform tragédie lyrique, to restore its French classical virtues, it fell prey to censorship on grounds of blasphemy and was never performed. Both music and original libretto were lost, although a revised, almost certainly toned-down version of the latter survives from a collection Voltaire published later in life. Adopting an approach both speculative and scholarly, in the best sense creative, Raphaël Pichon and Claus Guth have reinvented the work, delving deeper into the Book of Judges for context, yet setting the work in a present framed by Samson’s mother (movingly acted, not sung, by Andréa Ferréol, an ambiguous homeless man (Pascal Lifschutz) and other actors and singers (including an enchanting Angel from Julie Roser). Knowing that Rameau reused music from the opera, initial attempts were made to fit Voltaire to numbers from other works.
For instance, Pichon recounts: ‘you may be familiar with the entrée “Les Incas du Pérou” in Les Indes galantes. It contains a very impressive scene sung by the character of Huascar, who is also a basse-taille, and who also commits suicide – by hurling himself into a volcano. The music in this scene is truly breathtaking, and it gradually became clear to me that it had been used for the final scene of the destruction of the temple in Samson. So for that scene, I began to assemble a first mosaic. And so it went on.’ But it soon proved impossible to match music to the only version of the libretto to survive, so instead they adopted a freer approach, inventing that scenario and, in a way, letting both music and the Bible dictate, or perhaps even become, the drama. ‘And so,’ according to Pichon, ‘began a long and painstaking treasure hunt … and its moments of doubt when we deleted everything and started all over again. First we had to think about the number of acts, the nature of the prologue, the trajectory of a character within an act, and then the sequence of scenes, the structuring of each scene, trying to find the best way to get from one to the next, not to mention the range of tonalities and their sequences…’. Eddy Garaudel as writer and Yvonne Gebauer as dramaturge were deeply involved in the process too. A diary, if such a thing exists, or itself could be ‘reconstructed’ or ‘reimagined’, would doubtless be enlightened.
Voltaire’s determination to restrict recitative to the minimum makes for a fascinating ‘reform’, now incorporating speech and even sound design, that in some ways looks back to early Venetian opera – Pichon mentions Cavalli, who of course worked in France too – and forward through Gluck almost to wherever one will. It is a one-off, and its creators appear to have been liberated by that prospect. Dance becomes all the more dramatically focused, and if invoking the spirit of Wagner might be misleading, it is perhaps not entirely so. Others will have different standpoints, of course, and in many ways the work came across as a staged oratorio, a French counterpart to Handel’s work of the same name, Rameau, Voltaire, and their modern collaborators perhaps penetrating even deeper.
There would be much more to be written about the idea and realisation of the enterprise; it would be a fine thing if its creators were to do so, perhaps in tandem with some of the scholars Pichon cites. But what of the dramatic reality, as the sun set on Aix’s ever-magical Théâtre de l’Archevêché? The use of spoken texts from Judges, not quite in lieu of recitative but rather supplementing and framing, offered power and concision: worlds away from what any eighteenth-century (or later) censor would have approved. Étienne Pluss’s set design seemed to mediate between the colours and materials of vernacular architecture and a non-specific Canaan/Israel/Palestine that for obvious reasons presented problems of its own. There are clearly limits to how one might defuse, almost literally, those issues, given the subject matter. I felt uneasy at the literally monochrome portrayal of Philistines in black and Israelites in white, but perhaps black-and-whiteness was the point. In general, a temptation to make political points was, probably wisely, avoided. Samson’s own depiction, aided by sound design that gave voice to his internal agonies, was more a psychological study—and a powerful one at that.
Jarrett Ott’s work in bringing that study to life was outstanding, as well acted as it was sung, in (to my ears) excellent French too, which far from always goes without saying. The hero’s charisma and physicality – partly, it seemed, compensation for personal and social trauma – shone through, as did Ott’s chemistry with his fellow artists. Timna, a composite of various women with whom Samson was involved prior to Dalila, and then in the second part Dalila herself were brought to life vividly and in perfect style by the nicely complementary Lea Desandre and Jacquelyn Stucker. Nahuel Di Pierro’s dark, malovelent Achisch and the strikingly melliflous tenor of Laurence Kilsby as the ultimately doomed traitor Elon offered equally fine character studies in voice and gesture. Dancers and chorus contributed likewise, as impressive collectively as individually.
Both inspiring and supporting this was the outstanding work of Pichon and his Pygmalion choir and orchestra. The ensemble’s dark hue, inflected by moments of typically French éclat, underpinned one of the finest period-instrument performances I have heard, far superior to the previous evening’s Gluck. It was unabashedly bigboned, refuting the silly conflation common to many of ‘old’ and ‘small’, relishing rather a confrontation between old and new that played out on stage, in the pit, and in our minds. An unmistakeably Gallic bassoon enabled one, perhaps fancifully, to trace lineage up to Stravinsky’s Rite and indeed beyond, to early recordings of French orchestras, whose particularity has largely been lost in postwar homogenisation of orchestral sound. Pichon’s direction seemed unerringly to alight on the right balance, dynamic contrast, tempo, and more: a fine illustration of how scholarship and musicianship can and should inform one another in the heat of the dramatic moment. Perhaps another time it would have been different; it gave the impression of marrying due preparation with spontaneity on the evening, as did the performances of those on stage.
And so, when the temple came crashing down in the wounded, tortured Samson’s final act of revenge and personhood, Samson became the lion he once had rent asunder. Voltaire’s determination to avoid the lieto fine, fully supported then and now by Rameau, imparted an ending of veritable and venerable tragedy, Attic and Hebrew. The world stopped, scenically and musically, in a fashion both faithful and unfaithful to Samson and his original creators—and thus, one could fancy, to expectations ancient and modern. This was evidently a labour not only of love but also of conviction for all involved. In that sense and not only that, the figure of Samson and Voltaire’s bold, vanquished plans for operatic reform found themselves embodied in Rameau, Pichon, and Guth’s new Samson.
