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First day of opera rehearsal: Take out your thoroughly marked up, translated, well-worn score and sing through the music you’ve likely coached with your team for weeks. The musical lines are baked into your muscle memory, the plosive consonants calculated to the very last sixteenth note, the source material scoured for every possible dramatic beat. You sing the show beginning to end, and more likely than not, your preparation has—well—prepared you for exactly what transpires.
First day on film set: Show up. Play. See what happens. The difference is not one of preparation (we’d rehearsed and prerecorded Mirrorflores’ dynamic baroque soundtrack and had discussions about character, interpretation, and some staging), but rather of control. In the very structured world of opera, adherence to style, accuracy, and ultimate command of the voice are paramount, and control serves as the framework through which the very best performers are able to find moments of freedom and spontaneity. Here though, with the singing already taken care of, performing for a camera allowed for freedom from the start. For many fellows, certainly for me, this more immediate freedom was a welcome breath of fresh air. My scene partner and I were tasked with being mirror-image twins of one another. We were to find a brief escape from a purgatory-like existence (in the form of a 20’s garden party theatrical spectacular: the same show repeated ad nauseum as a means of torture and domination) and in our first moment alone discover one another for the first time, all to the tune of “Pur ti miro” from Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea. What would it be like to see your own reflection for the first time? How would it feel to play with your own shadow? To escape? To find a way to touch, and eventually embrace, in a (perhaps post-pandemic) world so devoid of human connection? Like the opera singers we were trained to be, my diligent scene partner and I came to staging with many pre-planned ideas. Some of this work was necessary to get to the level of synchronicity we wanted to achieve in our twinned movements, but we soon found that the real magic lay in the in-between moments: the flickers of unplanned yet still synchronized impulses, the hypnotic repetition and sensation of possibility in multiple takes, the flush of excitement in feeling the camera’s gaze close to our faces. We concluded that even as the world of live theatre is gratefully returning, there’s something about this world of film we can’t abandon, having experienced it once. This intimacy between camera and performer we experienced affords our beloved craft an exciting opportunity. With cinema, we have the ability to bring to opera—an art form arguably unmatched in its ability to combine the very best of so many other disciplines—one more mode of expression: one that is inherently more accessible to new audiences, one that continues to expand our capacity for human storytelling, one that propels us toward the future. Experience Mirrorflores now through September 12 here: https://musicacademy.cogplayer.com/event/mirrorflores/
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“The poetry of Bilitis is not unknown to me. For a long time, I have considered her a personal friend,” a professor of Greek archaeology writes to Pierre Louÿs in response to his Les Chansons de Bilitis, a translation of a set of poems discovered in the tomb of sixth century Greek poetess and Sappho-contemporary, Bilitis. The only catch? The original poems along with their supposed author never existed.
These 143 poems, grouped into three sections of Bilitis’ life (her childhood and earliest sexual awakening, her time on the island of Lesbos and relationship with a woman, and her life as a courtesan in Cyprus) are perhaps best known for their eroticism and then-controversial exploration of homosexuality. As it turns out, Pierre Louÿs fabricated their entire origin story. And even though he fooled some experts, much of his audience knew, or at least suspected, the dubious nature of his source material. But why choose pseudotranslation as an expressive form? Certainly, Louÿs enjoyed toying with the academic elite and their fascination with and reverence for the ancient world--claiming that just as his work was entrenched in historical invention, so too was academia. In what might be considered an early ancestor of the modern internet troll, when an unfavorable reviewer claimed to find anachronism in the work, Louÿs cited him in his faux scholarly bibliography in a later edition of the text. Also included was a fictional archaeologist named G. Heim, which only some were able to recognize as the pun that it was--on the German word geheim, meaning secret. Besides demystifying the academic elite, Louÿs’ work was transgressive in its treatment of erotica and lesbianism. He writes that most literary lesbians are femme fatales, but that his Bilitis is an idyll, both normalized and revered. However earnest this intent may have been, the modern reader can’t help but wonder if Louÿs’ intensely voyeuristic tone ever strays very far from the patriarchal norms of the time. While it is clear Louÿs was catering to a heterosexual male audience, his Bilitis would serve as a muse for many lesbian writers that follow. Particularly of note is Renee Vivien, whose own translation of Sappho’s poetry does much more to subvert the male gaze, centering instead the female experience. Contemporaries and friends, Pierre Louÿs and Claude Debussy gained much from each other artistically and personally. Debussy, enamored with Louÿs’ joie de vivre, bohemian values, and financial freedom, and Louÿs, avid lover of Debussy’s music and a student himself of piano and violin, found in one another a kindred spirit. It was only natural, then, that when a literary magazine commissioned Debussy to publish a new piece, he decided upon three of Louÿs’ Chansons to set to music. What then becomes of our Bilitis--a fictional poet whose invented history was transcribed, translated, and now adapted into music? Perhaps Louÿs’ veil of authenticity is still at work and, in listening to this song cycle, it is Louÿs’ poetry that transports us to a world of Greek mysticism and ancient pleasure. Or maybe it is Debussy’s richly chromatic and deliciously sensuous harmonic language that fully legitimizes her, deepening her story in a way only music can. Whatever the case may be, Bilitis--once a figment of a man’s imagination--has surely taken on a very real life of her own. |
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