JOHN CROFT MALÉDICTIONS D'UNE FURIE

Malédictions d’une furie takes Jean Tardieu’s short one-woman theatre piece of the same
title as the basis for a 45-minute opera-monodrama for female voice, bass and contrabass
�utes, cello, percussion, live electronics and electroacoustic sounds. In Tardieu’s work,
dating from the late 1950s, a Fury – one of the chthonic deities charged with the pursuit or
wrong-doers and punishment of unavenged crimes – turns her wrath against Chronos,
god of time; the Fury curses the god who from a position of aloof timelessness oversees
the endless and pointless torrent of birth and destruction that is human history. She
laments the condition of those whom she is required to pursue and torment.
The music sets the ostensible message of the text (that impermanence is a travesty and
something to rage against) against the opposite perspective, namely that there is
consolation and beauty to be found in the universal necessity of constant change. This is
achieved by taking the few brief moments in which the Fury seems to evoke this
perspective, and drawing these out into extended meditations, giving them more time to
resonate, relative to the whole, than they receive in the original text.
The work, heard this evening in a concert version with �lm projection, is in eight sections,
which fall roughly into two types (perhaps distantly evocative of the distinction between
recitative and aria): some movements re�ect the relentless fulmination that is the most
readily apparent aspect of Tardieu's text (I, IV), while others (II, III, V) are meditations on a
short fragment of text, sometimes hovering, sometimes combining wavering
ornamentation with a vacillating ‘�orid’ style distantly indebted to early baroque vocal and
�ute music. Starting with Movement VI, which culminates in the pivotal curse, these two
styles begin to merge.
With the exception of Movements I and IV, which contain some pre-composed
electroacoustic sounds, the electronic sounds heard are all real-time transformations of
the live vocal and instrumental sound. These treatments have been created and
programmed by the composer and are controlled in performance by a MIDI percussion
controller. Versions of Movements II (Intermedio), III (ô phosophorescence) and V (par
cette vie in�rme et vacillante) also exist as independent pieces.