House of Creations

DEBATE AROUND CASSANDRA

ARTISTS VS. ACTIVISTS: THE SAME FIGHT?
FEB 13 - 20:00 - La Monnaie

In the run-up to the creation of Cassandra, La Monnaie launches a series of debates dedicated to the urgency of the climate cause.

This second evening focuses on the relationship between artistic practice and ecological activism. In what ways can art and activism complement or reinforce each other? What is the role of artists in the fight against climate issues? And what if ecological efforts and creative freedom come face to face?

Intriguing questions that we want to put to "artivist" Chantal Latour, dramaturge and writer Martha Balthazar, choreographer Michiel Vandevelde, soprano Sandrine Mairesse (Youth for Climate), as well as activist Wouter Mouton and theatre-maker/writer Sébastien Hendrickx, both members of Extinction Rebellion.

And since we will be at La Monnaie, no better way to end the discussion than with music, and a performance by the Chœur Cassandra Koor.

Watch the whole performance of On purge bébé ! now via free streaming!

Howard Moody – The composer’s journal
 

#5 Production team meeting

The first group meeting with the management and creative team is always a vital moment in any big production such as Solar. There are so many practical and creative aspects to be discussed and in this project, it was wonderful to have this meeting before the first workshop/rehearsal started.

This was headed up by Bettina Giese (Director of Artistic Planning & Production) who had travelled to Strasbourg back in March to meet myself and Anna during performances of Les Rêveurs de la Lune (the opera that myself and Anna had written together for Opéra du Rhin). Bettina had been so supportive to us during the initial process of bringing our ideas for Solar into a reality. She was always completely transparent and clear-thinking about what was required of us and has built a wonderful creative team for this project.

Too often in these meetings, details of management are thrown into the room before there is an understanding of what it is that we are trying to create. However, this was not one of those meetings at all.

We began with Anna reading her entire libretto out loud to us and explaining her main dramatic ideas and influences for each scene as she went along. It was a special moment when, whilst Anna read the final scene, so many expert professionals sat together with tears in their eyes as the story and poetry drew them into her powerful re-working of the Icarus myth. For me, it was a real moment of unity whilst my role as composer and conductor started to merge. For Solar, there was immediately a feeling that we are all on the same voyage of intention, whatever the final outcome of everyone’s interpretations. The origins of the story are ancient, the re-working contemporary and profound.

Other discussions during the day included details of the schedule - always a complicated matter when a large chorus from a huge institution is involved, especially in a building that is booked up three years ahead. ‘The Planning’ is all!

It is our responsibility with Solar to create a piece that is manageable by other opera houses with a trained youth chorus. The dimensions of the Malibran studio were critical in this process. The size of the orchestra was established and decisions about positioning them behind the singers was discussed with the various specialist sound and stage management departments. The stage set design can be made to fit around the orchestra, now that all the different production departments have been alerted to the needs of the music. Everything suddenly becomes about space, ensemble and acoustics, which is especially tricky when there is no pit.

The rehearsals that followed were wonderful. The atmosphere was free and open in full knowledge that once the main stage rehearsals begin, everything will slow down whilst every detail is attended to. The purpose of the day was to capture the imagination of the participants. I returned home satisfied that everyone was “in”.

I returned back to the UK with the responsibility to compose the rest of the opera knowing the parameters of what will be possible in production. I hope that my awareness of these issues when writing the piece will make it suitable for future productions in other opera houses who have their own chorusses of young singers. It is time for the voice of the next generation to be put in the forefront of today’s theatres.

Bees at the opera

Bernard Foccroulle: "One of the first ideas put forward by Matthew [Jocelyn, the librettist], right at the beginning of our discussions of this opera, was to devise three moments (not very long ones) when one would only hear bees. There would be plenty of them in the first scene, around fifteen in the second and only a few would remain in the last one. It was a way to evoke nature and the work of these precious insects whose extinction we now fear. It was also a way to connect with the mythological era, when bees were already considered as essential, almost magical beings, linked to the worship of Apollo. To “compose” these bee scenes, I listened very carefully to the bees in my garden in Brittany."

"At the beginning of 2021, there was a very useful work session with the orchestra: under the direction of Ouri Bronchti, the strings of La Monnaie sight-read the three bee scenes. I also wanted to check the writing in the sixth-tone system, which would enable me to evoke these glissandi that are typical of these insects’ flight. I became aware of the need to space out the musicians’ parts to avoid the risk of cramp, given the speed of the tremolos. Here is a fragment of the first and last of these three scenes, recorded at this rehearsal at La Monnaie in January 2021. The strings are by themselves - they most often play at the bridge, to produce this typical bee sound."

Anna Moody - The Librettist’s Process

#4 Hearing the music for the first time

I think this is the hardest part of the process to explain. Nothing quite captures the feeling of hearing the music for the first time. But I’ll give it a go...

I count myself uniquely lucky to have grown up hearing Howard play his compositions to me. The familiar sight of him at his Steinway with various pencils and manuscript paper spread out in all directions, and hearing him playing and singing to capture an orchestra of some forty instruments as well as multiple choirs and soloists all at once, takes me back through every single year of my life. Those moments of hearing him express things that are so much bigger than any human words, really shaped my entire world-view and showed me what is possible when you give voice to your whole heart.

Now that we write pieces together, there is an incredibly deep connection, communication and understanding between the words that I write for his music and the music that he writes for my words.

In an opera, the music is what characterises every single moment of the drama: the emotional characteristics of each section, the pace of the action, the depth of the characters and the tensions in their relationships. The words - which must be alive and spacious enough to become music - can only point the composer in a particular direction. And so, once Howard has set off down a pathway that I’ve signposted, the world-building of the piece continues and expands.

For Solar, the first bit of music that I heard was the end of Scene 2, when the Apprentices and Icarus grieve the death of Talus. The words on the page are four distinct verses, which look like this:

By one hand, goodbye,
and all change,
losing ground, falling away as if in a dream.

One life goes cold, nothing remains,
but we carry on and on as if in a dream.

Will we trust again
when we’re left behind? Can we live as before when we long to rewind?

Beat our hearts, the rolling waves, day by day they flow.
We carry on, our tears fall,
it’s time to let you go.

Behind the text is a sea of feeling which the words alone merely a gesture towards. Howard has an incredible ability to exactly capture the character of that emotional sea - its colour and movement and the particular energy of its rising waves and tides. He sees straight through words, follows their rhythms and sounds the heart behind it.

In musical form, these particular words are expanded and layered in so many different vocal parts and harmonies. Howard has taken phrases and used them to build a web of interwoven melodies, that lead to sections of text being repeated and passed between different vocal groups (for example, “beat our hearts” and “as if in a dream”).

And so, it is only when I hear Howard’s music that I truly understand the full meaning of what I have written. Every time it knocks me sideways.

Howard always gives a disclaimer when he stops playing - that he alone can’t do justice to what it will sound like with an orchestra at full-pelt and all the singers giving it everything they’ve got. When I do hear that, and see all the different musicians playing and singing what he’s written, it is quite overwhelming. Just a few short lines of text take flight and become something that is breathing and physical and alive.

The composer Bernard Foccroulle

"This morning, Wednesday 28 December 2022, I sent the publisher Ricordi the orchestral score for my opera Cassandra. Four hundred carefully etched pages, which I’ve attentively proofread and corrected. By doing so, I wrapped up a job I started in spring 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, in close collaboration with Matthew Jocelyn, author of the libretto and Louis Geisler, the dramaturge. Over time, the team has been enhanced by the involvement of stage director Marie-Eve Signeyrole and conductor Kazushi Ono, as well as the singers who I’ve talked to in person or remotely. I’ve sent them excerpts of the score and gradually, I’ve tried to adapt the score as closely as possible to their vocal qualities.

The pandemic and lockdown enabled me to dedicate myself immediately to the project’s development, and to start composing from summer 2020. Six months later, I had a first fruitful work session with Katarina Bradic, who is playing Cassandra. I had already seen and heard her at work during my tenure as Director of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, where Katarina sung the role of Bradamante magnificently in our 2015 production of Alcina.

These workshops during composition are extremely useful, because they enable you to make more in-depth contact with the performers, to check certain aspects of the vocal writing, in a nutshell, to start making the essentially solitary work of musical composition concrete."

Howard Moody – The composer’s journal
 

#4 Writing music for the first chorus workshop

The first pressing deadline for Solar was the delivery of some chorus music for the first workshop/rehearsal at the end of June. This involved the Children’s Choir of La Monnaie (who play ‘The Sun’) and the Youth Chorus (who play the Apprentices).

The challenge was to give each group a couple of contrasting choruses from the opening of the opera in order to capture their imaginations and help them internalise the story through singing and movement. The dramatic choruses of scene 1 which frame the murder of Talus offered a great starting point. These could then be contrasted with the Sun’s magical transformation of Talus into a bird and then the Apprentice’s mourning of his death in scene 2. This Lacrimosa offered an opportunity for me to write music in four parts for the older Youth Chorus, maximising their ability to sing long sustained vocal lines in harmony.

I initially had six weeks to deliver the score for this rehearsal. It was important for me to be able to show my music to Benoit Giaux before it was printed. Our mutual understanding of what makes a project work for his choirs is a special connection. He had already told me exactly what range fits each group best, the amount of rehearsal that they would be likely to have and the numbers of voices involved. He is brilliant at his job and so precise and demanding when required. It was important for me to deliver a perfectly edited and accurate score, especially since it is difficult for young voices to re-learn music with changes in it later on in the process. They learn so fast and ultimately by ear, so once a melody in inside them, it stays for ever! I managed to get the scores to Benoit ten days in advance, enabling him to do some work on the music before I arrived.

My role as conductor as well as composer involves me in two completely different processes. The most important part of taking on both roles is that I have to own every single note as a composer. If I write something too challenging, voiced in an awkward way or not naturally “vocal”, then I have to face that head-on in rehearsal and also in performance! Sometimes I have been in situations as a conductor where a new piece has been given to singers with no awareness of what is possible. This causes rehearsals to become miserable (even if in the end an unusual effect may be achieved).

But the commission of Solar is a fantastic opportunity for me to write for voices and groups that I know so well from writing previous operas for La Monnaie. One of the singers took the lead role at the beginning of The Brussels Requiem in 2010, others have sung all the other operas for La Monnaie since 2014, including Sindbad, Orfeo and Majnun and Push. Therefore, the workshop day in June felt like a unique moment in a continuum of work and it was thrilling when the young La Monnaie chorusses immediately internalised both the music and the drama from the music that I had written.

I hope my experience of these voices will ensure that Solar becomes a piece ideally suited to other similarly trained groups who are attached to big opera houses. There is so much scope for a new body of work for these voices - all of whom have so much to express on stage, especially about the environmental issues that Solar exposes.

Within a short time, Karine Girard (the choreographer) created a wonderful atmosphere with her movement work. Circles and high energy diagonal movements showed the burning, raging sun. In contrast, still but strong movement defined the Apprentices’ grief. This was all facilitated by Benoît De Leersnyder (the director) who is a master of drawing everyone into the deep significance of an opera’s metaphor. We had the dream team: buoyant, happy, focussed and serious all at the same time.

The day finished with the Apprentices learning the lachrymose song that mourns the death of Talus. It sounded completely beautiful and touching after some real work on sound and balance. After they had sung it from memory, one of the young singers asked me how I had written it. Having heard my music sung with such commitment, I had to answer only with utter honesty. I admitted how a few blobs of ink on paper doesn’t look like much when you are given it as a performer but that feeling certain enough to deliver it as a composer is the product of extremely hard work.

I described how I have ideas that I sketch, perhaps over many days (like Beethoven’s sketch books) but that musical fragments have to form with a true dramatic intensity. Making my own theatre in my head is very much part of that. I then showed them how the chorus was constructed over a ground bass, with each of the voice parts building up with their unique melodies that weave amongst the harmony, completely independent of each other.

There was a magic in the air when everyone sang the piece again. The request to sing quieter was no longer an instruction but something that everyone could understand as necessary to bring out different melodic lines and emotions.

I returned home feeling absolutely ready to complete all the solo music of Scenes 1 and 2. I haven’t met the extremely fine soloists yet but I have heard them on recordings and I know the sound world of the choruses that they will be joining. It was always the idea to put the voice of the next generation into the centre of Solar and I am confident that their urgent voice for change will be heard.

Anna Moody - The Librettist’s Process

#3 From script to stage: the librettist’s relationship with the director

The trust and respect that I have for Benoît De Leersnyder as a director gave me so much confidence and excitement when writing Solar and I had his creative style in mind as I wrote. I have seen one of his directed productions before and we had also worked together previously as he translated another libretto of mine (Les Rêveurs de la Lune) into French for an upcoming performance in Avignon. Our discussions about Les Rêveurs as a story, a script, and also in performance in Strasbourg (March 2022), told me that this was a director who truly understands my writing on a deep level.

It is a big moment to hand over a script to a production team so that it becomes reshaped and expanded by so many other creative minds. Any mental image of staging that I might have had during the writing process will disappear and the story becomes bigger than I could have imagined.

With Benoît steering the ship of this Solar production, the handover process has been a productive one that has involved detailed discussions together about the text and the characters. Benoît and I have had FaceTime calls together about the piece, and recently spent a morning just unpacking the meaning of individual words together! It is a joy to work with an opera director who is so in touch with the libretto and so dedicated to the details that it contains.

When I had first finished the libretto, it was important to me to present it to Howard and Benoît first before sending it out to the rest of the team. We had a three-way zoom call and I read it out loud to them. At the end of each scene we paused to discuss the action and I explained my various influences and concepts behind it. Benoît has a sharp radar for the audience’s experience and the realities of performance and so his suggestions are always useful. From advice about contrasting the endings of scenes to the need for characters to use each other’s names so that the audience knows who is who, Benoît’s perspective enabled me to polish the text ready for the production team to take on.

A librettist can often feel ghosted once the text is handed over, and indeed might be as new to a production as the audience when it comes to the premiere! However, being quick to spot moments of ambiguity and eager to understand a writer’s intention, Benoît facilitates a transition from text to stage that is dynamic, communicative, and unique.