Now that the bickering around Timothée Chalamet’s recent statements about the death of opera and ballet has quietened and public attention has thankfully moved on to more pressing matters, we can note that while opera is not dead, already many of my parents’ generation would be more familiar with Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus than with Le nozze di Figaro. So, how do we proceed from here? Opéra de Lille seems to have a solution in mind, having just premiered a new co-production with the Staatstheater Darmstadt of Philip Glass’ Les Enfants terribles. This relatively young opera was entrusted to the care of just as young a team, on stage but also on the podium and behind the curtains. Together with conductor Virginie Déjos, the directing duo of Matthias Piro and Lisa Moro worked to make Glass’ adaptation of the 1929 Jean Cocteau novel into a story that would arouse the curiosity of the present-day public.
Gratefully, this didn’t entail the low-hanging fruit that often comes with commentary on new generations – addiction to social media, seemingly innate vapidity – and instead created a genuinely intimate space. Glass and his librettist Susan Marshall follow Cocteau’s narration of the codependent and desperately morbid relationship between siblings Paul and Élisabeth. Orphans from a young age, the two are left to deal with the magnitude of their feelings with no compass other than each other. The solitude that shelters them, maintaining their world immobile and perpetually intact, also makes them extremely vulnerable to any outside interference. Encounters with other characters – Paul’s classmate, Dargelos, and their friends, Gérard and Agathe – tip the balance of the siblings’ game, ushering in muted desires, jealousy and fears.
Piro and Moro plunge the characters into a claustrophobic setting that echoes Glass’ score. The entire stage is made into Paul and Élisabeth's flat, which rotates around a central axis so that each room can be shown just by turning the architecture. The decor deliberately introduces the themes of the story – a painting of Adam and Eve, a poster of Godard’s Vivre sa vie – while also lending realism to the space. However, as the story progresses, unsettling things begin to happen. Rooms start mutating imperceptibly, with objects appearing and disappearing and doors changing position. For most of the opera, the flat’s layout keeps transforming to the point of disorientation. Just like Gérard and Agathe, we are also dragged into the maze of Paul and Élisabeth’s games, at once playful and terrifying.
To further complicate things, Glass and Marshall’s libretto filters the opera through the words of a nameless Narrator, thus placing the events in the past and adding another layer of unreliability. The extra level of narration, originally evoked through extensive choreographies, is materialised by Piro and Moro with the aid of videos that the characters allegedly recorded in the past. As the appointed Narrator, Gérard replays the videos through a camera, its contents projected onto a screen hanging above the stage. But as the same events unfold both on video and on stage, discrepancies creep in, once again suspending the partition of reality and dream.
This ghost-train atmosphere derives directly from Glass’ music, in constant oscillation between tragedy and amusement. Les Enfants terribles is an amazing example of chamber opera, not just because of its orchestration – only three pianos – but because of its perfectly closed-ended composition. So airtight is the musical design, that the thoroughness becomes stifling, achieving a degree of sinisterness found in its purest form in Britten’s The Turn of the Screw.
Déjos immersed herself in the score, bringing out expressivity from the minimal changes in constantly recurring elements. As with all Glass’ works, millimetric precision is required to make the music to move forward and give it its due width. Great coordination between pianists Flore Merlin, Nicolas Royez and Nicolas Chesneau allowed for build-ups of musical strata and constant exchange of basic material – scales, arpeggios, etc – to produce movement within the otherwise static macrostructure. This tension between development and repetition was made intensely dramatic by Déjos, who showed great sensibility for volume and rhythm.
A similar restlessness was to be found on stage, thanks to a very confident and close-knit quartet of singers. Marie Smolka’s Élisabeth associated a robust soprano, full in the middle register and lyrically phrased, with an electric stage presence, bringing to life the contrasts of her character. Sergio Villegas Galvain veered towards a melancholic portrayal of Paul, reliant on his flexible, wistful baritone. By their side, Nikola Printz and Abel Zamora added solid performances as Agathe/Dargelos and Gérard, the former with a rich, light mezzo and the second with an intentionally emotional, soft tenor.
Elena's press trip was funded by Opéra de Lille
