Volume 21 Issue 2 - October 2015

Facing the Darkness
Barbara Monk Feldman And The
Making Of A Contemporary Opera
Facing the darkness, whether metaphorical or real, is not an activity
most of us are drawn toward; human struggle and tragedy is, in
fact, often what we seek most to avoid in our pursuit of a happy
life. Opera is renowned for its dramatic portrayal of the bigger
emotions at play in these difficult aspects of human experience, letting
the characters and music take us deeper into a more visceral encounter
with life’s complex moments. In her opera Pyramus and Thisbe, which
runs at the COC from October 20 to November 7, Canadian composer
Barbara Monk Feldman takes a unique approach to the existential reality
of having to face the darkness, both within and without.
I recently sat down with her in a local park for a conversation about
the nature of the opera and how it came into being. Often an opera is
created through a collaboration between a writer
and a composer with the promise of a production
at the end of a long and complex road. Not so
with Monk Feldman’s Pyramus and Thisbe. First
of all, the opera was written through a process of
following her own creative instincts. A few years
after it was completed in 2010, a colleague who
plays in the COC orchestra encouraged her to
send it to COC general director, Alexander Neef.
She got a quick reply – a request to see the score
– and from that point on, the production was underway.
However, the ideas for the opera had their beginnings several years
ago after she heard a lecture, given by the French feminist writer
Hélène Cixous at the University of Toronto, in which Cixous stated
that the history of theatre is one of “love too late.” Monk Feldman
thought hard about this and wondered if it was possible to create an
opera that as part of its modernist nature would not be caught up in
this lost love or love too late theme which characterizes much of the
traditional opera repertoire.
The original story of Pyramus and Thisbe appears in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses. Ovid was a Roman poet who lived at an epic time –
the turning of the ages from what we now call the BC or BCE period
into the AD or CE period. Metamorphoses is a continuous 15-book
mythological narrative that has had an enduring influence on Western
art and literature. The Pyramus and Thisbe story is one of ill-fated
lovers and is, for example the basis for the plot of Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet and explicitly central to A Midsummer
Night’s Dream.
So in choosing this star-crossed story as the basis for the opera,
Monk Feldman meets the challenge of reframing the “love too late”
motif head on. Using the original story as a jumping-off point,
she created a libretto compiled from three very different writers:
American novelist William Faulkner, 16th-century Spanish mystic
St. John of the Cross and early 20th-century author Rainer Maria
Rilke, whose German-language prose and poetry is full of existential
themes. All the texts she chose are applicable to the original story,
but her main intention was to capture the essence that is behind
each writer’s body of work. “I’m looking for an assemblage, taking
little micro pieces but always with the idea – what is the essence of
that writer?”
She speaks about how she thought long and hard about each source.
“The Faulkner text is one of the most beautiful poems I’ve come across
in prose. The writing is full of pathos and is coming from someone
who has reached the point of dying.” And that’s where the opera starts
– with Pyramus facing his fear of death, the idea of his own suicide
and his resistance to the abyss that is approaching.
WENDALYN BARTLEY
The second text is the poem Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of
the Cross, an examination of the fear of the unknown and the idea
that sometimes you have to look at the darkness, that you can’t ignore
it. Monk Feldman talks about how there is a modern sensibility to
this text, and that it looks forward to the coming of existentialist
thought. “The Rilke text is very much about facing our vulnerability
and letting the moment fall away. You can’t hang onto things or make
them into a dogma. You let them disappear, but they never completely
disappear,” she says.
So how do all these abstract ideas translate into a work for the
stage? This is where the element of time comes into play. One of the
opera’s other major influences was the painting Stormy Landscape
with Pyramus and Thisbe by Nicolas Poussin,
the leading painter of the classical French
baroque style. What attracted Monk Feldman
in this painting was the slight shifting of
movement between the foreground and the
background that you can see in the way he
uses light and colour. “When you really look at
a painting, stare at it without moving your eye
away for about 20 minutes, something changes
physically in your eye. You begin to see the
diffuseness of the light and the delicacy of the colour and shading.
It’s a very subtle thing, and the opposite of the mechanical light in TV
and film.”
This idea of shifting time becomes central to the opera – both in
the way the libretto unfolds as a non–narrative form and the way the
musical elements interact with each other. Musically, Monk Feldman
is looking for the integration of the three musical forces – the singers,
the chorus and the orchestra, with one or another of them moving a
little in front of the others. The chorus is always there as a presence
with the orchestra sometimes supporting the singers and sometimes
withdrawing. It’s not the normal accompaniment and melody where
each has their place. All the elements are working together to create
the interior landscape of the story.
There are also some very technical challenges for the singers. What
Monk Feldman is looking for is a particular vocal sound that is the
opposite of the bel canto style opera singers are trained in. It’s a sound
that has a sustaining quality to it, that has no attack, with the addition
of a little bit of warmth, a touch of vibrato and then a decay that
dissolves into the stillness. It’s a sound that “engages overtone light,”
she explains, although admitting it’s hard to describe in words. “I
know it when I hear it; it’s an intuitive thing. It sounds like a hard
cold thing to do – to sustain a note and go into nothingness, but it’s
the overtones that add a certain warmth. This quality is important
because it brings the human dimension into play in what otherwise
might be a micro idea of subtle interaction. This style of singing
also means that at times the singers are quite exposed, particularly
when the orchestra withdraws. The further challenge is that the sound
always has to be even – it’s a question of how much warmth and how
subtle can you be.”
“It’s not a full blown drama or narrative, but what we are looking
at is the emotional residue of a larger picture,” she states. “My aim is
to challenge the performers to have the courage to sound somewhat
vulnerable. When that happens something in the quality of the colour
changes in a good way.”
It’s this ability to be vulnerable which is the key aspect of the
music. “The opera is very still with the sounds going into nothingness.
The concrete sound that
moves a little bit like the
shadows of the leaves on the
ground
Barbara Monk Feldman
10 | Oct 1 - Nov 7, 2015 thewholenote.com