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Georges Aperghis: A talk with Frank Madlener In the
beginning was the text. Tragedy: Shakespeare, Müller Georges
Aperghis.— I’ve been living, breathing, and thinking about Heiner Müller’s
text for two years. I had a plan to write a kind of mass for the end of the
century. I imagined several movements and various texts for a collage, like
those of Antonin Artaud and Lovecraft. So I took a look at Die Hamletmaschine, with the idea of
taking an excerpt from it. Well, everything that I wanted to say
was there! I read it, taking notes all the while, without a break. Then I
dropped everything. I thought long and hard about the immediacy of the text,
so as not to soften or water down its impact, so as to leave all its power
intact and give it force! Frank
Madlener.— . Isn’t it a tragic poem, rather than a theatrical
text per se? G.A.— I
have the impression that it is a great dramatic poem that could be
represented abstractly. It has a capacity for abstraction and at the same
time talks about real things. Jourdheuil the translator helped me a great
deal to understand it all, for each sentence in the text is coded, full of
allusions to Shakespeare and Artaud. F.M.— Even
Electra puts in an appearance at the very end! G.A.— Shakespeare
was inspired by the Greek tragedy. Orestes and Electra together actually form
Hamlet. In Hamlet, the uncle and mother are the ones who
kill the king. The son, Hamlet, has taken the place of Agamemnon’s children,
who avenge the death of their father, murdered by Clytemnestra and her lover,
Aegisthus. Except that Hamlet can’t bring himself to avenge his father. He
can’t take the fatal step, remains caught in constant indecision. ‘To be or
not to be’, to do or not to do, to take or not take action these are the
questions making up Hamlet. It’s as if action were in contradiction with
thinking. F.M.— The
same as the 'organless body' inspired by the text ‘Pour en finir avec
le jugement de Dieu’. G.A.—
Absolutely. ‘I can no longer think’, ‘my thoughts are wounds, arms for
grasping, legs for walking’. The Hamlet machine takes its place. Ophelia, for
her part, gives voice to death, at the end: ‘When death passes through your
bedrooms with butchers’ knives, you shall know the truth’. Since revenge
cannot be taken where it should, well then, we decree death! That inevitably
brings up the image of the Baader gang, which so preoccupied Müller. (...) The artist,
the intellectual in the crowd and above the battle. The end of utopia. F.M.— The
first impression generated by Hamletmaschine is that of the
chorus’s oppressive presence. The characters are merely emanations of this
crowd, hallucinations from the chorus, linked directly to it, as in Greek
tragedy. G.A.— That
idea comes from the text. When you read it, you don’t have the impression
that there is a chorus. Yet Müller wrote some passages in upper case letters.
I asked Jourdheuil about this change in the writing. He answered that Müller
conceived of each character as multiple, that there were several Hamlets and
Ophelias, and the upper case passages could be the words of a chorus. I
immediately thought of the ancient Greek chorus, which comments on what is
going on and draws conclusions. On the other hand, Bach’s passions were in my
mind. So, I thought of Die Hamletmaschine as if it were a
passion. F.M.—
Might this passion be the death of utopia in Europe? The death of all
possibility of a human community? G.A.— The
passion of all that. It is a political, psychoanalytic, existential text. It
would be hard to cover these thirteen pages, which remain enigmatic. Each
time you read them you discover something new. F.M.— At
the same time, some powerful signals proper names traverse these ruins of
Europe. The ghosts of Marx, Lenin, and Mao. As these names are uttered,
history knocks us on the head! G.A.— But
these figures do not remain in a given, historical situation. They become
universal. So, Müller describes an uprising that follows a national funeral!
A monument is pulled down and the paupers who live in the fallen monument
spill forth. They are archetypes. No story is being told. This uprising is a
true nightmare. To portray this riot I did not use the brass, that is, force,
but on the contrary, like in a hallucination, I worked with muffled inner
restraint. Someone’s having a nightmare. But at the same time, Müller injects
a social thought, a political commitment that is a reality. As you listen to
the news on the radio you have the impression that it is following the
writer’s text, word for word. So, he managed to turn reality into the
symbolic and to condense it. F.M.— All
ideas of an uprising collapse. It is the great tragic circle: revolution, the
creation of a new world, is strictly impossible. The obsession of giving
birth fills this text. Monstrosity has been born, yet Hamlet wants to deny
all giving birth today. G.A.— That
is what Ophelia says at the end. Milk becomes poison, the progeny return
whence they came. Engendering an upheaval effectively proves to be
impossible. A few people in power are hanged. And there, it is interesting to
note what Hamlet’s character says, for he is actually on both sides: ‘My
place, if my tragedy were still taking place, would be on both
sides of the front, between the fronts, above’. That is precisely the
intellectuals’ place; they are doomed to that, to take sides and to be above. F.M.— Or
the artist’s situation as well? G.A.—
Hamlet looks ‘through the swinging armoured-glass doors at the
crowd that pours in’ and at the same time he ‘stands in the smell
of the sweating crowd and throws stones at policemen, soldiers, and tanks’
... "I am my own prisoner [...] Sobbing in the crowd. Breathing behind
the swinging doors, secreting a spittle of words in my soundproof bubble
above the battle. My tragedy has not taken place’. That’s essential.
Here, the writer takes the floor. The
spawning of the oratorio on a field of ruins F.M.— At
another point in the score you divide the syllables of the text between the
two soloists. It is impossible to believe in one or the other character. One
figure ceaselessly tilts into another, under the sway of the crowd, and that
gives birth to the grand musical form. Did you immediately have the idea of a
continuous form, with recurrent motifs, like the alto’s melismas, the
scansion of the scenes, the blocks of crowd? G.A.— That
took me a lot of time. First of all, this text put me through the mill, it
actually made me ill. It contains such violence, such cynicism as well. That
is what makes it so lucid. It took me a while to find the form. The alto part
sung by Geneviève Strosser as Ophelia is central to it. She leafs through the
family album. In Scene 1 she will read, ‘I was Hamlet’. Amidst all the chorus’s
whisperings Hamlet enters. Next, with the singer’s voice the mother arrives.
She too emerges from the music. Then, Ophelia. That’s precisely it. The
mother turns into Ophelia. An endless cycle of birth. That is what I wanted
to try in my musical form. F.M.— The
saturation of high registers gives an impressive effect of being locked in.
Your very powerful writing for the chorus is rare in your work! G.A.— I had
never written that way before, so vehemently, for a chorus. Especially in the
second part. But, once again, the text called for that. I absolutely wanted
the chorus to sing in German, for the colour, the impact. And then, we are
after all with Heiner Müller, in the middle of Berlin! The soloists, for
their part, perform in French. As far as they are concerned, I had some
specific musicians in mind. I’ve often worked with the latter, especially
with Jean-Pierre Drouet. F.M.— The
instrumentation is very striking. Notably the synthesizer with the colours of
a common organ that seems to be singing of a lost era, an obsolete story. G.A.— It
does indeed have a nauseating sound to it. In the beginning I was thinking of
a Hammond organ. Might I have an affinity for the organ? I remember a trip to
Moscow, in Gorbachev’s time, when I was part of an official delegation. We
had been invited to a sort of official bar where a small Soviet orchestra was
playing with a spindly organ. It was as if we were surrounded by ruins
without hope. On the other hand, the celesta is the music box. All of that
sounds so old, it’s so old and at the same time current. Actually, our
current events are old. The power
of the composer in the city today F.M.— Die Hamletmaschine puts the violence
and collapse of all human societies on stage. No more childbirth, no more
utopia, no more preserved individual, no more artist who cannot be fully in
the battle or outside the battle. The following reproach frequently crops up
regarding the relationship that is forged between a composer and a community,
between an artist and the public authorities: ‘But what role do you play in
the city today?’ This reproach, which is often levelled directly at music, is
aimed implicitly at all ideas of modernity. This judgment is less frequent in
the theatre, which seems to meet its educational obligations more clearly! G.A.— But
the powers in question do not help the function of modern music. They never
have. At the very most, they tolerated, or caught up to modern music. The day
that 99% of the music played is contemporary and 1% music from our classical
heritage, our role will be obvious. As was the case before
the 19th century. If you look at the opera or orchestra programmes, it’s
absurd. The powers that be would like to say, through their reactionary
behaviour, that music has already been written, it has stopped. We have
enough music. Today’s creations are taken for tinkering. It’s a totally petty
bourgeois attitude combined with total ignorance. What is more, there is
complete scorn for the audience, about what it may or may not hear. We are
living in a point in time that is enduring and worsening, when access to what
is called culture and intelligence is becoming very difficult. People are
finding it harder and harder to take on intelligence in a work of art. You
need time to enter a painting. Music calls for time. But so does reading one
of Dostoyevski’s novels. Our role is old-fashioned. We are no longer up to
date. But music is no more isolated than another art, no more than poetry, in
any case. Of course, it doesn’t have the immediate impact of theatre, which
wields meaning. Nevertheless, with music I do not have the impression of
having taken up the priesthood. By nature I like two-way communication! I am
convinced that the artist is privileged. He can be sufficiently present to
show people something. To reflect upon it together, on an imaginary or social
level. He thus creates a to-and-fro. That is the eminent role of the artist.
Of course, our action is minimal, a drop in the bucket, in the economic
context. But that isn’t serious. The important thing is the reciprocal
movement between the artist and the recipients of his work. 24
November 2000 |
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