Votre Faust


Votre Faust : Fantaisie variable genre Opéra is an opera in two acts by the Belgian composer Henri Pousseur, for five actors, four singers, twelve instrumentalists, and tape. The text is by the French author Michel Butor. Originally written between 1960 and 1968, it was premiered on 15 January 1969 at the in Milan, and revised in 1981. Although about seven hours of performable material exists, the variable structure does not permit use of it all in a single version, and performances to date have been between three and three-and-a-half hours.

History

In 1960, the French author Michel Butor published an article with a title that may be translated as "Music, a Realist Art: Words and Music". When Pousseur read Butor's exhortation to composers to rediscover music's representational power, he felt a resonance with his own growing doubts about the Darmstadt aesthetic with which he had been associated for nearly a decade. On 29 September 1960 Pousseur wrote to Butor, asking to collaborate on a project and proposing the theme of Faust. Their first contact was some months later, when Pousseur was preparing the premiere of Répons at the Domaine musical in Paris, and in June 1961 Butor came to Belgium to plan the details of the project with Pousseur. In 1962 they published a preliminary version of the libretto. Work on the music proceeded slowly, over a period of time that included Pousseur's three-year residency at the University of Buffalo. The opera was first performed in a concert version on 17 March 1968 in Buffalo, New York, and finally staged for the first time on 15 January 1969 at the Piccola Scala in Milan, in a production that lasted nearly three and a half hours.
Shortly after the Milan performance, an hour-long documentary film was made for Belgian television, without the participation of either the stage directors or set designer of the La Scala production. This film, titled Les voyages de Votre Faust and directed by Jean Antoine, includes the closing section of the opera, with all of the possible endings shown in succession, each with a number of the preceding scenes assembled in different sequences, to illustrate the changing contexts.
Up to the end of the twentieth century, Votre Faust had been staged only twice since the Milan premiere in 1969: a production of the revised version in a German translation at the Musiktheater im Revier in Gelsenkirchen on 13 March 1982, and another in Bonn in 1999. None of these stagings were completely successful. Pousseur himself described the first production as the opera's "création-naufrage" and "an artistic disaster", and the second as "only an approximation". It was staged again at Radialsystem V in Berlin in March 2013, in a co-production by Work in Progress and Theater Basel, also taken to Basel in November of the same year.

Cast

The premiere was produced by Georgia Benamo and Roger Mollien, with sets by Martial Raysse.
Although actors perform all of the central characters, the roles may be "polyvalent": sometimes also represented by singers or instrumentalists. For example, in the opening scene of act 1, while the actor playing Henri mimes the action of "analysing" Webern's Second Cantata at the piano, an actual pianist, costumed identically, appears onstage to perform the music in parallel. In the same scene, the actor-Henri rehearses a religious work, sung onstage at the same time by the soprano singer. On the other hand, the actors may perform various different roles in the same scene, and in different capacities, while also exchanging roles with the musicians. In one of the puppet-show scenes, for example, the same part may be performed in mime, dance, and song.

Orchestra

The orchestra consists of just twelve instrumentalists, who often appear onstage and interact with the actors and singers:
  • Flute
  • Clarinet in B
  • Alto saxophone in E
  • Bassoon
  • Horn in F
  • Trumpet in C
  • Percussion
  • Harp
  • Piano
  • Violin
  • Violoncello
  • Contrabass
In addition to the live players, electronic music on tape is played back over loudspeakers in the hall.

Synopsis

Prologue sur le théâtre

The Theatre Director, a figure from Goethe's Faust I, introduces Henri as a writer of brilliant and provocative articles, who will explain some of the perplexities of modern music to the audience. This pre-concert talk is lip-synched and mimed to a recording of excerpts from Pousseur's article "Pour une périodicité généralisée", gradually dissolving into a complaint to the audience about the unsatisfactory current state of Henri's career, in which he spends all his time talking about music instead of composing it. His complaint is accompanied by recorded fragments from Berio's Thema and Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge, both electronic music compositions.

Prologue dans le ciel

An instrumental "re-overture" made from a set of "one hundred celestial notes", derived in turn from nine twelve-tone rows quoted from works by Boulez, Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Stravinsky, Webern, and Pousseur himself. The orchestra performs this music onstage, beginning in the dark but with variously coloured spotlights gradually picking out the course of the canonic musical process.

Act 1

  • Scene 1. Alone in his apartment, Henri is seated at the piano, analysing Webern's Second Cantata. He is interrupted by the Theatre Director, who has come to offer Henri a commission for a Faust opera.
  • Scene 2. Having accepted the commission, Henri goes to a café by the church, where he meets Greta and Maggy. A cabaret entertainer sings the French translation of Mephistopheles's serenade, with music of the lullaby from Alban Berg's Wozzeck, distorted with jazz rhythms. In the background, the sounds of water fountains, chirping birds, and clinking glasses can be heard, together with musical quotations from Debussy.
  • Scene 3. On the street outside Maggy's residence, music in the style of Varèse collides with bits from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, sung by a homeless man, and music by Bartók.
  • Scene 4. At the urging of the Theatre Director, Henri visits the fairground at the port, where he is confronted by a cacophony of musical quotations, fragments of conversations in different languages, and noises of all kinds. A series of fairground booths present different shows mixing up quotations and different historical musical styles, which are made to interact with early twentieth-century modernist idioms. The French booth, for example, mixes quotations from Gounod, Berlioz, Bizet, and Massenet into an amalgam suggesting the style of Darius Milhaud; the German booth transforms quotations from Weber, Lortzing, and Wagner into the style of Schoenberg; the Italian booth merges fragments ranging from Rossini to Puccini into a style suggesting Stravinsky; while the "English" booth actually quotes from a variety of mostly non-English church music, distorting them into a neoclassical style meant to suggest Hindemith.

    Act 2

The course of act 2 is determined in part by the audience, who vote to decide things such as whether Henri should take Greta or Maggy to the fair, and whether Henri should escape the Theatre Director by taking a cruise or else stay to work on his opera. In the central fairground scene, there is a puppet show with four different versions of the Faust story, each with its own particular musical colouration. Throughout this scene, the audience is repeatedly called upon to decide whether to continue with the current version, or change to one of the other. In three of the four possible endings, Henri never even begins to compose his own Faust opera. The work closes with a general finale which presents a critical interpretation of the events that took place during whichever version the audience has witnessed, and in which it has participated.

Style and structure

The title Votre Faust is meant on the one hand to recall Paul Valéry's unfinished play Mon Faust, and on the other to refer to the mobile form of the work. The second-person possessive pronoun also suggests a connection to Butor's best-known novel, La modification. Butor and Pousseur call Votre Faust a "fantaisie variable genre opéra", in order to emphasize its distance from operatic conventions. Although live singers are called for, the principal roles are taken by actors, instrumentalists share the stage and interact with the singers and actors, and much of the vocal material is actually prerecorded on tape. The second act has an aleatory structure, in which the audience determines the course of the action by formal ballots at some points, and by vocal interjections at others. There are about seven hours of material in the thousand pages of the score, but only a selection can occur in any one version. Because of this intentionally variable structure, duration may vary considerably from one version to another, but stagings to date have been between three and three-and-a-half hours.
The fabric of the work, both textually and musically, is made from a vast network of musical and literary quotations, alluding to many earlier Faust-themed musical and literary works, and to past musical styles extending from Monteverdi to Boulez. Together with some other composers who have sought to integrate heterogeneous material and musical languages into their work, Pousseur's methods continue to qualify as being serial. The number five governs many elements of the opera: it is the number of actors, of locations, of languages, colours of scenic lighting, and of versions to be determined by ballot of the audience. However, although there are five different epilogues, because there are actually six different possible routes to each of them there are in effect thirty different resolutions of the story. The five locations are tied to the five lighting colours, and in the first act present the five languages progressively:
  1. Henri's room : lit in blue, using only French
  2. The cabaret near the church: lit in green; languages: French and German
  3. The street where Maggy lives, lit in yellow; languages: French, German, and English
  4. The fair near the port, lit in red; languages: French, German, English, and Italian
  5. The port itself, lit in violet; languages: French, German, English, Italian, and Spanish
Each of the first four locations occurs at least once in each of the possible versions of the opera. The port has the wildest atmosphere, but only appears in one possible version, as the closing scene of the most unfortunate course of action. It is for this reason that many echoes of the port are inserted into the fair and street scenes.