Legacy 23-Julietta

Accordion Dreams

Oct 11, '12 6:20 AM for everyone

There can’t be all that many opera productions in which a giant accordion is a major part of the scenery; even in an age of self-consciously strange and “clever” staging it suggests that there’s something a bit odd about the piece.   The ENO’s recent production of Bohuslav Martinu’s “Julietta” makes considerable use of the oversized instrument and it is indeed a distinctly strange opera.

It’s based on a play “Julietta ou le Clef des Songes” (“Julietta or the Key of Dreams”) written by the French Surrealist Georges Neveux in the late 1920’s and first stages in 1930..  The process by which Martinu came to create the opera has its own surreal side.  Neveux had offered the option of adapting the play for the musical stage to none other than Kurt Weill during the latter’s Paris period.   Martinu then write to Neveux along the lines of “I know you’ve offered the rights elsewhere but I just happen to have done an arrangement of the first act myself- please come to my place and hear it”.  Neveux went to Martinu’s apartment in the south of Paris near Parc Montsouris (territory I used to know very well myself back in the distant days when I lived in Paris) ready to give him the brush off but was so taken by what he heard that he asked his lawyers to get him out of the Weill contract.  Or so, at least, Neveux subsequently claimed; I wonder if he was being a bit disingenuous to cover up some rather unethical behaviour on his part (especially as it appears that another musical adaptation of the play had been made by the time Martinu picked up on it) .   One also wonders what Weill would have made of the play- admittedly by this time he was a bit past the jazz band and agitprop world of his collaborations with Brecht and heading towards his Hollywood period but his sound world is rather different from that of Martinu.   Martinu did his own adaptation of the play to translate it into his native Czech for a 1938 premiere in Prague; as I’ve never seen the original play I’m not sure how far he may have tinkered with the storyline for dramatic effect.   Since Neveux allowed Martinu to adapt one of his later plays for the operatic stage, however, he can’t have been that unhappy.

The plot of the opera isn’t that easy to summarise.   Michel, a slightly weedy bookseller from Paris, turns up in an unnamed seaside town.  Three years previously, on an earlier visit, he had heard the voice of a girl singing through an open window and become so obsessed with the memory that he had come back to find her.   The problem is that all the inhabitants of the town are amnesiacs, unable to hold memories for more than a few minutes.  Playing an accordion brings memories back for some, but in fragmentary form.   Michel is briefly made mayor because he can recall his earliest childhood memory.   The postman delivers three year old letters; a few minutes before he was a police detective.  Fortune tellers predict the past.   Michel encounters his love object Julietta and they agree to meet in the woods- rather surprisingly she actually turns up.   When she does, she acts as if they’ve been a couple for years.   A memory salesman tries to sell them the holiday snaps and souvenirs of a past holiday in Spain- Michel rejects them in favour of his “true” memories, only to find that Julietta has a very different “memory” of their first encounter and one which shows him in a less than favourable light.  He loses his temper and shoots her- or does he, because there’s no body to be found?   He finally boards a ship leaving the town.   The final act in the Central Office of Dreams, where it emerges that the first two acts were all a dream which Michel doesn’t want to abandon even though it becomes increasingly clear from the dreams being issued to other clients that Julietta is the common dream woman for them all.   He wants to go back into his dream to find her; the bureaucrats want him off the premises by closing time.   Eventually he is hustled out- but he still hears her voice and the opera ends more or less where it began, with Michel arriving in the town again and looking for a hotel which no longer exists, if it ever did.

Being a Surrealist obviously means you don’t have to worry too much about logical consistency.   The precise contours of the mass amnesia in the town seem to shift around from character to character and episode to episode- Julietta seems to have two parallel memory tracks running at once when she meets Michel, for instance, with the unfavourable one activated when he doesn’t collude in the memories she wants to have.   The Central Office of Dreams doesn’t seem to cater for female customers (at least none turn up to request a dream during the scene) and surely the Office can never close as people sleeping in non-European time zones have as much right to a dream as the French.   The precise mechanics of the ending are a bit odd- Michel is bundled out of the Office on the argument that if he stays there after closing time he’ll never get out of the world of dreams but he somehow ends up there anyway.

I suppose as I get older I find myself thinking more about memory than I used to do- there’s a lot more of my life covered by it than there used to be.  I’ve always had a reasonably good memory but I know I find it hard sometimes to place things that happened to me in quite the right order or relate them reliably to what else might have been happening in my life at the time.  As it happens, I do a daily diary entry so in principle, if it really matters, I can always try to look things up- assuming I can get somewhere near the right year to start with!  But suppose the external back up is itself highly unreliable?    What happens if someone turns up with photographic evidence that you were on holiday with them when you clearly recall that you weren’t- particularly if the person making the claim is someone you’d very much have liked to be on holiday with (there’s a kind of premonition of Susan Sonntag’s view of photography in the way Neveux constructs the role of the memory seller)?   How far do memories depend on external confirmation by third parties- at one point an elderly couple are greeted by a café owner as old acquaintances even though he is simply making this up to keep them happy?

Given that it is set in “the present”, it’s intriguing and revealing that one topic nobody appears to have any memories of, even in the most fragmentary form, is the First World War, which must have dominated the memories of so many in 1930’s France (and indeed Czechoslovakia).   In retrospect Martinu noted that the opera’s first night more or less coincided with the Anschluss and the slide towards war but doesn’t hint that he saw any direct linkages between the aspect of repression of unbearable memories which may play into the opera and the political context of its creation.

The one place which appears to contain distorted echoes of contemporary events is the Office of Dreams.    This is very much a rule bound bureaucracy –though with a welfare aspect (the indigent are allowed a quota of one dream a week, on Fridays).   There’s a whiff of Kafka about it- appropriately enough for a Czech opera.   There is surely also a reference to the growing importance of state structures in economic and social management, even in countries like France and Czechoslovakia which had not yet succumbed to totalitarian rule.   “Julietta” was written at the point where the theories of Freud and Jung had begun to filter into the consciousness of the artistic and cultural world, blending and overlaying older traditions relating to dream states which attached fixed, often prophetic, meanings to dream events.   These stretched back into classical antiquity and were articulated in books of dream interpretation- one of the most popular of which was known as “The Key of Dreams”.    Neveux’s dream bureaucrats seem to work with aspects of both ancient and modern understandings of dreams- an intriguing approach though one which makes it harder to decide what Neveux’s “message” is, if indeed he has one.

There is a slightly unexpected element of gender bending in the opera too.  Three enigmatic “gentlemen” slip round the edges of the action; in the ENO production they’re dressed to be alter egos of Michel but they’re all sung by women.   Martinu justified this as a way of dealing with a shortage of female roles in the original play but they add to the unreal atmosphere.   More intriguingly, the sailor whom Michel enlists to look for Julietta’s body is first seem in dialogue with one of his crew mates asking for the loan of a dress which the latter possesses; his search fails to find a body but does turn up the shawl which the memory seller had included as part of the Spanish holiday package.  The sailor begs Michel to be allowed to keep it as his colleagues all have lots of stuff and he doesn’t.    On wonders what goes on aboard ship- and whose dream world we are looking into here.

Martinu’s music has a suitably shimmery and dream like tone for much of the time, not undercut by deliberate irony- musically the romantic high point almost exactly in the middle of the opera when Michel and Julietta meet is done absolutely “straight”, without a hint that her response is based on false memory, let alone that she probably doesn’t exits outside Michel’s imagination.   Unsurprisingly the sound world is very similar to late Janacek, with echoes of Ravel and Debussy and D’Indy in the mix.  The ENO production was vocally fine; Peter Hoare manages to combine a distinctly nerdish look with romantic longing and Julia Sporsen is a gorgeous flame haired Julietta whom one can well imagine seducing a passer by with her voice.  The rest of the cast has to double and treble up and does so effectively.   It’s a rather odd opera but this is probably as good a rendition as it’s going to get.