“When you compose something, you are blocked sometimes. For my part, I find solutions in the music of Palestrina, of Beethoven, of Stravinsky, not from my contemporaries. The solutions are somewhere in the past.” Yann Robin is talking to me from his home a few miles outside Paris. We have been discussing his new opera Medusa, which he composed as a sort of frame to go around Alessandro Scarlatti’s oratorio La Giuditta and which is about to receive its second production in August at the Chigiana International Festival in Siena.
Already performed at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg, who co-commissioned the work, Robin is explaining to me the importance of historical music to his own compositional process. “The language and the material are completely different”, he continues. “But the articulation and the relation with time… if you understand what they did, it helps you understand well what you are doing and how to organise your own material with your own language.”
That said, it seems that Robin had no problems with being blocked during the composition of Medusa – or had very little time to be, at least. Normally a new opera commission would come together over the course of a year or two. This one was composed in little more than six months. Robin was first approached about the idea last autumn when the librettist Elisabeth Gutjhar asked him if he would be interested in composing something that would comprise a prologue and epilogue to La Giuditta. Although anxious about the short timeframe, he could not resist the proposal. He already loved Scarlatti’s music and was quickly excited by the idea of how his music might evolve in conversation with it.
At this stage, neither Gutjhar nor Robin had any concept of what their framing story would be, or how it would connect to Scarlatti’s story of the Biblical Judith, who liberated the besieged city of Bethulia by seducing and then beheading the enemy general Holofernes. (Incidentally, Scarlatti composed two oratorios with this name; the one in question here is the so-called “Cambridge” Giuditta, composed in 1697 to a libretto by Antonio Ottoboni.)
However, Robin had for some time wanted to write an opera around the figure of Caravaggio. He had fallen in love with his work while a fellow at the Villa Medici in 2009 and, indeed, his wedding took place at the church of San Luigi dei Francesca in Rome, in front of Caravaggio’s triptych on St Matthew. (“It was like a dream. When you are in front of these paintings – wow! – something happens.”) As he and Gutjhar talked more, it became clear that the artist could serve as a bridge for the two parts of the Scarlatti project, since Caravaggio’s painting, Judith Beheading Holofernes, is both one of the artist’s best-known works, and one of the best-known portrayals of Judith’s story.
Scarlatti’s oratorio would stand in for the painting, and Robin’s prologue would show Caravaggio and his muse, the courtesan Fillide Melandroni, at work in his studio. There, Caravaggio has recently completed another iconic image, his circular self-portrait as Medusa, and the hissing voices of the Gorgon’s snakes (portrayed by the amplified voices of the musicians) nightmarishly intrude on and interrupt him as prepares to paint again. Recounting the suffering of the beautiful Medusa, Fillide is able to console him with a reminder that all terror begins in beauty. And so it is that – with her as his model – he is able to paint Judith’s killing of the despotic Holofernes.
Initially, Robin considered using elements from La Giuditta as materials for his own Medusa, but in the end decided that “it is better to let Scarlatti be Scarlatti”. Instead, his contribution emphasises the contrast between his music and Scarlatti’s: while the Scarlatti is performed by the Baroque Orchestra of the Mozarteum, Medusa is performed by an amplified contemporary ensemble (sitting in the same pit), using modern instruments. The sharpness of this contrast is essential not only to the dramatic effect – switching viewpoints from the painter to the world of his painting – but also, the composer says, to the musical impact. “I really liked this idea to switch from contemporary music, my music, and Baroque music. The Baroque music will be the painting, and I have to find a way to imagine the artist before he creates something new.”
On the other side of the Scarlatti, Caravaggio’s painting is complete, but as his models retreat, the artist remains haunted by the hissing of the Medusa. For this third section, Robin drew inspiration from a more recent painting: Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus of 1920, and its famous interpretation by Walter Benjamin as the “angel of history” staring helplessly at the destructive process of history while being blown helplessly into the future.
The part of the angel is sung from the pit. “The representation of an angel is not so easy”, says Robin. “Maybe it is better not to watch her, but just to imagine what an angel is for you.” From there, her voice fills the auditorium, and Caravaggio’s thoughts, with reflections on the inevitable recurrence of violence. “His face is turned toward the past”, wrote Benjamin about Klee’s angel. “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”
Effectively a monologue, Robin’s Angelus Novus begins as a whisper and ends just short of a shout. The music is highly rhythmic, with two layers of mechanistic ensemble music standing in for the thoughts of Caravaggio and Fillide. (Robin’s description of their infernal pulsing brings to my mind Edgar Allen Poe’s horror story, The Tell-Tale Heart.) Over this intricate but insistent texture, the soprano’s voice sails high, celestially, before it is suddenly, and completely, silenced. The effect, Robin says, recalls the ninth circle of Dante's Inferno: a terrible, frozen hell.
This is Robin’s first experience of the Chigiana festival, although he has known its artistic director Nicola Sani since 2009 and his time at the Villa Medici, when he featured one of Sani’s compositions in the Contratempo new music festival that he organised that year. “It is fantastic to exchange ideas” with someone like Sani, Robin says, someone who is both a composer and a programmer. “You create music, but you also create something around it, because when you think about your festival, your academy, your season, you have the thinking of a composer.”
One of Chigiana’s focuses this year is the music of Pierre Boulez, whose centenary this is. Eighteen pieces by the late French composer and conductor will feature – from the early Sonatine for flute and piano to the massive Répons for chamber orchestra and electronics. Robin had a lot of contact with Boulez, although to begin with, he saw him only as an icon. Their first encounter was accidental, outside the lifts of the IRCAM studios in Paris, where Boulez was director.
“It was like being in front of the history of music”, Robin recalls. “I was ridiculous, I think”. But despite this starstruck introduction, Boulez became interested in Robin’s music and would come to his rehearsals whenever he could. In 2009 they toured together in Helsinki. “It is so important as a young composer to be encouraged by someone for whom you have admiration”, Robin says. “He gave me a lot of confidence.”
As a composer, Boulez’s attention was very much on the future, particularly as an artist trying to make sense of the aftermath of the Second World War. It seems impossible to imagine him writing something alongside Scarlatti in the way that Robin has with his Medusa. This brings us to the relationship between past and present with which we began. “To be an accomplished artist”, Robin argues, “it is necessary to have knowledge of the past, with eyes very far in the future, and to be conscious of the present of your time… It’s a necessity for me to have a connection with the past because without that you can become naïve.”
With hindsight, we can see that Boulez was like that too. “He would not have been able to create what he did without the past. We have to know where we are from, and where we are going.” Artists today, he concludes, are like opposites of the Angelus Novus figure. They stand with their backs to the past whilst being constantly aware of it. “But at the same time you are turned to the future, and you are in the present, so you feel your time.”
Yann Robin’s Medusa and Alessandro Scarlatti’s La Giuditta are performed on 27th August at Chigiana International Festival, Siena.
Chigiana International Festival runs from 9th July to 31st August.
This article was sponsored by Accademia Musicale Chigiana.
