Die Welt ist so alt (Ribac/Büchner)
Voice: Eva Schwabe
Achter Mai (Ribac/Schwabe)
Voice: Eva Schwabe
Un demi-siècle/Ein halbes Jahrhundert
Premiered in October 1995 at the Péniche-Opéra, Paris, and at the Rathaus Schöneberg, Berlin
Opera for soloist, interviews and recorded music
At the origin of this project was, on the one hand, our desire to create a show about the memory of the Second World War. Furthermore, we had been deeply impressed by the way René Lussier (on his album Le Trésor de la langue, 1989) and Steve Reich (notably in Different Trains, 1988, and The Cave, 1995) had respectively composed music that followed the inflections of (and accompanied) the spoken voice. The idea of conducting interviews quickly took shape. As the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi defeat was being commemorated, we asked high school students and young adults living in Paris and Berlin two questions: “What do you know about May 8, 1945?” and “How do you envision your life fifty years from now?” Between these two sections, we included a Hebrew prayer in memory of the dead El Malei Rachamim—evoking the Shoah. The opera concludes with a poem by Paul Celan, The Eye of Times.
“Here is the eye of times
It looks torpidly
Under a brow of seven colours.
His eyelid is washed with fire,
Its tear is steam.
The blind star flies towards him
And the warmer lash melts it:
The world warms,
And the dead
Bud and bloom.”
(with the permission of Éditions Christian Bourgois)
It is, therefore, a sort of musical reportage, whose key element consists in the dialogue between a “real” singer and “virtual” digitized voices. A performance without images, so to speak, where the soloist is placed in front of a screen which, in turn, casts her shadow or – through a backlight effect – draws her silhouette.
Press
Le Monde de la Musique, october 1995
Kurt Weill’s children
… Like Valérie Stephan, François Ribac is at the crossroads of a vocal writing that is as much akin to the Ravel of L’enfant et les Sortilèges and the American prosody of a Robert Ashley as it is to the integration of popular rhythms in the manner of Weill. In a magnificent and very original first chamber opera entitled Marguerite et Ida Helena Annabel (1) – given at the Théâtre du Roseau three years ago – in which the musician sensitively alternates spoken voice and song, Ribac found this Weillian idea of “a sardonic subversion of popular musical material, whereas traditionally composers use this material in a classical style (Liszt, the Russian composers) or in Bartok’s quasi-ethnological style – whereas Weill appropriates popular styles by diverting them, as Stravinsky does in Petrouchka”. As with Weill, what drives his music “are not only musical problems but ideas; the choice and meaning of the libretto, the representation of the characters and its combination with other art forms”.
His second opera, Un Demi-Siècle, co-written with his main performer Eva Schwabe and premiered this month simultaneously in Paris and Berlin, is “a free evocation – through interviews with young adults (French and German) – of the fifty years that have just passed and the fifty years to come: the form is that of a dialogue between the real soloist and the reworked voices arranged and harmonised in the studio”. Un Demi-Siècle will be preceded by a selection of Weill’s songs originally written in French, English and German by several performers (2).
Franck Mallet
(1) François Ribac Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel (Eva Schwabe, voice) 1 CD No Man‘s Land NML 9319 (distributed by Orkhestra)
(2) François Ribac/ Eva Schwabe Un Demi-Siècle-Ein Halbes Jahrundert, La Péniche Opéra, Paris, 6, 7 (9 pm) and 8 (5 pm) October 1995
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