Liebeslied/My Suicides - Presentation

Outline of the Project

Paul Clark, Composer (English);
Alexander Garci­a Düttman, Librettist (German)
Rut Blees Luxemburg, Artist (German)
Conductor: Stuart Stratford

Listen to music from this piece...

Liebeslied/My Suicides is the product of an unusual collaboration between an artist, a writer, and a composer to create a different kind of opera. In 1999 the acclaimed artist Rut Blees Luxemburg created a photographic series that represents a celebration of the lovepoem/lovesong in the modern city.

In My Suicides, a text written in response to this work, Alexander Garci­a Düttmann discloses a parallel world, which intersects with the images. Thoughts about photography are woven into a plot with shifting identities, a love story between the philosopher and the artist, between the philosopher and an unnamed lover, always shifting focus, shifting tone.

The composer Paul Clark is adding a third voice to Liebeslied and brings this work to completion. Dense and rich in counterpoint, the music will heighten and reinvent the dark and irreverent elements of the scenario.

The three characters of the opera - the Lover, the Writer and the Artist - in some ways mirror this configuration of collaborators. The Writer investigates his complex relationship with the Lover by absorbing and articulating the images of the Artist, but as the opera develops the identities, conspiracies and desires of the protagonists become increasingly entangled.

Integral to the opera are The Liebeslied Photographs which form the changing stage set. The three characters of this opera constantly metamorphose, remaining isolated and yet merging into one another in their struggle to articulate love and creativity. The audience becomes caught in these dialogues of succinct intensity, a poetic narrative trajectory that leads to the Writer's final suicide.

Three talented artists, drawing on references as diverse as Jacques Derrida's "postcards" and the 19th century song cycle, have set out to forge a new form of music theatre.

Liebeslied - A Statement by the Creative Team

It all starts with a series of large-scale photographs. They show urban landscapes, often at night, lit by the artificial lights of the city, devoid of human faces. Then, a text transforms these intensely chromatic images into a series of sets, as if the spaces they represent had called for a play to be staged. Now photographs and text are about to become an opera.

Just as the text never simply described the images to which it refers, the images do not illustrate the music, and the libretto does not seek to make the musical texture intelligible in the manner of a plot. Rather, music, text and photographs respond to each other, question, interpret and challenge one another.

Three figures appear: an artist, a writer, a lover. The artist, a tenor, asks the writer to be his guide. In giving him her eyes, the writer, a mezzo, will allow the artist to see his images for the first time; and yet it is the artist who allows the writer to find a voice of her own.

The writer evokes the figure of the lover, a soprano, who comes on stage and sings her first lines, a perhaps ironic echo. In the course of eleven succeeding scenes, in which the photographs are projected onto a screen or a wall, these three figures get entangled in a web of expectations and desires, reflections and outbursts, ruses and conspiracies.

They all undergo transformations, with the idea of suicide circulating between them, and in the end they perform a ritual, as if a resolution had been reached. Whether it contains a march, amounts to a scherzo or an elegy, each scene has a different pace, slow or quick. There are turning points and interludes. The choreography of the figures' movements is as important as the lighting of the scenes. All three figures sing:"I want your passion". The very process of creation, of inspiration and self-destruction, is at the heart of the opera Liebeslied / My Suicides.

The score (trumpet, trombone, 2 violins, viola, cello, bass, 2 pianos) consists of discrete but closely related pieces ­ arias, duets and trios. As the opera progresses and the emerging worlds of the three figures collide and fuse, arias become rarer. The writer embarks on a musical journey. In the beginning, her style is spiky; when the opera comes to a close, she sings in sweeping phrases, not unlike the artist whose lines are lyrical throughout. The lover's role is more enigmatic. She can pick a style to suit herself. She mimics or teases the other characters, or she sings what is required to change radically the tone of a scene.

Casting at the Workshop

Lover Natalie Raybould Soprano
Writer Emma Selway Alto
Artist Hal Cazalet Tenor

Repititeur: John Paul Gandy (and Stephen de Pledge for performance)

Instrumentation

Trumpet in Bb, Trombone, Violin x 2, Viola, Cello, Double Bass, Piano