Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✭✭
by Claude Vivier, directed by Chris Abraham
Soundstreams, Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto
October 27-November 4, 2017
Vivier: “I’ve always wanted to die for love”
Soundstreams is presenting the first-ever staged performance of Musik für das Ende by Claude Vivier (1948-83). Written in 1971as a ceremony to be staged, the work did not have its first concert performance until 2012. After seeing director Chris Abraham’s beautiful, extraordinarily moving production of the the piece for Soundstreams, it is impossible to think that it could ever be better imagined or performed. It is a great work. Why it should have taken this long for it to be produced as the composer wished is impossible to understand. That it finally has been staged with such obvious passion and commitment is a cause for celebration.
Musik für das Ende, a 25-minute-long work, lends its name to an 80-minute-long evening of which it is the main component. The evening is in three parts. First comes a play by Zack Russell entitled Il faisait nuit about Vivier’s last night on earth. Vivier was murdered on March 7, 1983, in Paris by a man he had picked up and brought back to his apartment. The first part of the play is followed without interruption by Vivier’s final work, Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele? (Do You Believe in the Immortality of the Soul) which was found on Vivier’s desk after his death. Then comes the second part of Russell’s play followed by Musik für das Ende (Music for the End). In this way Abraham provides an audience unfamiliar with Vivier and his work a biographical and aesthetic context in which to view it.
Abraham stages the programme in the round as if all of us are judging the action or at least are involved in it. Il faisait nuit finds Vivier (played by Alex Ivanovici) returning home the night before his death to find the door to his apartment open. His question is whether to step into the dark room where a burglar or one of the other lowlifes with whom Vivier had become familiar might still be lurking. With a mixture of excitement and fear he decides to step inside and has to fumble about to turn on the light.
With this seemingly innocuous situation, Russell has actually encapsulated a key part of Vivier’s personality. Danger and the possibility of harm or death excites him. As a devout Catholic and an uncloseted gay man, he was entranced by ritual,whether that of the Church or that of BDSM. Vivier’s favourite word to describe something great is “transcendental”. The remainder of Russell’s play, drawn from Vivier’s correspondence and interviews with people Vivier knew, confirms this. Vivier tells us that only the previous night a young man he brought back to his apartment had robbed him holding a pair of scissors and gave him a minor wound. We hear messages on Vivier’s phone left by friends who are worried that the way he has been living lately is far too risky.
Vivier brushes these concerns aside. He is much more preoccupied with the question of how to end the short piece he has started, Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele? and jokes about the disparity between the length of the title and the shortness of the work. To get over the impasse where he finds himself, he goes out again, likely to pick up another stranger.
After this abrupt ending, we return to Russell’s play where we hear various voices speculate on whether Vivier actually had a premonition of his own death or deliberately sought it. Russell has Vivier say that how he looked at the world changed shortly after a lover of his committed suicide. Vivier was at a party, but all he could think was this: “Living in the midst of beings destined for death I have often reflected upon this. Instinctively I see these beings no longer in life but in death. In my dreams I was living more and more the strange ceremony of beings who vanish for ever, who become an ‘infinite moment’ in the eternal silence”. More than anything, this provides a key for understand Musik für das Ende, which bears the dedication in German, to “die Leute die heute sterben werden” (“the people who will die today”).
Following directly after Vivier explanation of his revelation as the party is Musik für das Ende, which under Abraham’s guidance becomes a “strange ceremony of beings who vanish for ever”. Ten singers (representing the twenty in the original score) enter the stage wearing undistinguished coats and heavy scarves as if they were refugees entering a holding chamber or perhaps just people gathering in a place more protected from the cold. Lighting designer Kimberly Purtell has dimly lit the space from instruments set on the four surround walls of the auditorium. More significantly, she suspends twelve bare, unfrosted light bulbs, their glowing looped filaments clearly visible. Their ability to be lowered nearly to the floor or raised up high and their ability to increase or diminish in output seem to signal different phases of the “ceremony” we witness.
What strikes us first as the ten singers – five men, five women – amble aimlessly about the stage is cacophony of sound. It is as if we are hearing the babel of lost or homeless worshippers praying for deliverance, fortitude or calm. Each of the ten is chanting in languages invented by Vivier and each is chanting his or her individual chant. Each is also assigned a different percussion instrument to sound at what seem to be random intervals.
Ever so slowly as the group mingles pairs of two singers form and re-form. When the two meet each sings his or her own chant to the other until one of the two adopts the other’s chant and the two turn away both singing the same chant. Over the 25 minutes of the piece these transactions or conversions occur, each involving an adoption and a surrendering of identity, until by the end the ten singers have evolved into two groups of five, each singing its communal chant to the other as if in a battle of ideologies. Visually and aurally this gradual transformation from the chaos of individualism to a binary opposition is totally enthralling.
Abraham reinforces the idea that the interactions of the singers are a means of trying to create personal links and greater order by having singers literally tie the cords holding the suspended light bulbs together in bunches of three or four. Periodically, while the singers are chanting, we and they hear portions of a pre-recorded traditional mass, particularly the “Kyrie”, play from speakers overhead. The effect suggests that there is an order that transcends the human that the babel of human voices strives to approximate but only through much effort and frequent failure.
Indeed, if one views the ceremony that Vivier has envisioned, it is as if a humbled humanity is struggling to undo God’s punishment of the pride of the people of Babel in attempting to “build ... a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven” (Genesis 11:4). In other words, the singers in their interactions are ultimately attempting to achieve transcendence, except that now the universal language they strive for is silence.
The ending, which I will not describe, is absolutely devastating. We gasp at the profundity of Vivier’s insight into the human condition, of the transience and confusion of life on earth.
Anyone who appreciates chant of any kind, Gregorian or Buddhist, cannot fail to be moved by what Vivier achieves in Musik für das Ende. Though the piece is clearly incredibly difficult to perform, the singers led by John Hess as conductor and Abraham as director make the complexity appear an effortless recreation of randomness evolving toward order. The effect of the music is so sublime I felt I had to avoid listening to any music whatsoever for at least the next 24 hours simply to revel more fully in the magnificent sound-world Vivier has created. Musik für das Ende is no less than a mind-expanding experience that no one of a contemplative nature who loves music or theatre should miss.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Scene from Musik für das Ende, ©2017 Claire Harvey; Alex Ivanovici as Claude Vivier, ©2017 Gesilayefa Azorbo; Vania Chan, Adanya Dunn and Bud Roach, ©2017 Claire Harvey.
For tickets, visit www.crowstheatre.com.
2017-11-01
Musik für das Ende