Eleven years after the bewitching Written on Skin, which marked the Festival in 2012, composer George Benjamin is back for Picture a Day Like This. “An initiatory and philosophical tale, lost somewhere between The Little Prince and Alice in Wonderland”, explain Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma. This is not their first collaboration with the British composer. In 2006, they had already worked together to create Into the Little Hill. This commission from the Festival d’Automne and the Paris Opera had sealed the decisive rapprochement between Benjamin and the one who would become his exclusive librettist: Martin Crimp. “During our first meeting, he just said to me: “Write why we sing”, confided the composer to us in 2019, on the occasion of the recovery of the work at the Théâtre de l’Athénée. I wrote him six pages to respond to this eminently philosophical subject. And I came back with my notebook, in which I had recorded for twenty-five years about sixty possible titles of operas, inspired by novels, plays, films. He chose The Pied Piper of Hamelin. (…) We started talking about the form. In forty-five minutes, we had the whole opera.”
For Picture a Day Like This, co-commissioned by the Festival d’Aix with six other opera houses, Crimp and Benjamin reconnect with the initiatory fable. “The story of an ordinary woman, who begins an ordinary day, and to whom an extraordinary tragedy happens: the death of her child. To bring him back to life, she has only one thing to do: find a truly happy person. Then begins a journey whose crazy trajectory will lead her to a fairy garden… At least in appearance, summarizes Jeanneteau. A very mysterious text, with very heterogeneous atmospheres. In a rather baroque sense.”
To bring it to life in the setting of the Théâtre du Jeu de Paume, the artists will call on the videographer Hicham Berrada. “He never works for live performance but created toxic gardens inside aquariums which, for the final scene, allowed us to open the imagination towards the phantasmagorical territory that opera calls at this moment. and that we could not have materialized in pure scenography.”
A territory which, according to them, owes as much to the text of Crimp as to the music of George Benjamin, discovered three weeks ago. True to his own rituals, the composer is always extremely secretive during the writing phase. “I isolate myself completely for the duration of the composition, he explained to us three years ago. (…) I don’t say anything about what I’m writing, because I don’t feel capable of it: I discover it myself by writing.” “At the beginning, we therefore worked only from the text”, confirms Marie-Christine Soma. “George Benjamin had told us a little about it, but the discovery of music was still an electric shock which forced us to work a lot on the set, almost in real time, to adapt our vision”, comments Jeanneteau. An approach perfectly assumed with the singers. Starting with the two main characters: the Woman, played by Marianne Crebassa, and the owner of the garden, Zabelle, sung by Anna Prohaska. “With their personalities and their colors of stamps so different, the singers, for whom Benjamin composed directly, represent a large part of the dramaturgy of the opera”, attests Soma.
Théâtre du Jeu de Paume, July 5, 11, 12, 17 at 8 p.m. and July 8, 14, 15, 22 and 23 at 5 p.m. Concert at the Darius Milhaud Conservatory: Benjamin conducts the Mahler Chamber Orchestra on July 19 at 8 p.m. hours.
