Words Without Music: A Memoir (52 page)

The scene pretty much sums up how Cocteau must have felt when he began
Orphée
only a few years after World War II had come to a close. In 1949 Cocteau, who died in 1963, was sixty years old, and he was no longer treated as the young artist, writer, and filmmaker genius he was taken to be in the twenties and thirties. He had clearly been pushed aside. He knew that he was a great creative personality, yet nobody was any longer paying attention to him. He was regarded as someone who no longer had to be taken seriously.

The situation that Cocteau found himself in interested me, and when I told my French friends that I was basing operas on Cocteau’s work, they said, “Why would you do that?” They didn’t ask even what it was that I was planning to do.

“He is one of the great writers of France,” I replied, recalling how intrigued I had been when I first saw his films in the Hyde Park theater when I was a student at the University of Chicago.

“No, he isn’t.”

“Yes, he is.”

“
Mais non!
”

“
Mais si!
”

In their opinion, Cocteau was a populist and a dilettante, because he did drawings, he wrote books, and he made movies.

“You’re absolutely wrong,” I said. “What he was doing was looking at
one
subject—creativity—through different lenses.”

In Cocteau’s version of the myth, in the film’s last act, after Orphée has been killed and returns to the Underworld, he declares his love for Death, whom we met in the first scene of the movie in the guise of the Princess, the poet Cégeste’s patroness and companion. But Death has already decided on a course of action that will free Orphée to become an immortal poet: to restore Orphée and his wife Eurydice to life, Death/the Princess reverses time back to the moment before Eurydice’s death. Heurtebise, Death’s chauffeur, tries to dissuade her from the forbidden act of reversing the arrow of time, but her answer is astonishing and final.

“The death of a poet requires a sacrifice to render him immortal.”

When Death is asked what will happen to her now, she replies, “It is not pleasant.”

But we know that the price Death will pay is her own death—her own immortality will be taken from her. We know this beyond a shadow of a doubt, and we have known it from the beginning. Shakespeare’s rendering of this idea appears as the last line in his famous Sonnet 146, written more than 350 years earlier:

“And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.”

Only a writer as remarkable as Cocteau would have known to take a sentence of Shakespeare and make it the key that turns the lock in his film. The skill of Cocteau is to lead all the threads—Orphée’s political, social, and personal obsessions, many of which reflect Cocteau’s own—to a resolution and clear expression. One of the autobiographical aspects of Cocteau’s treatment of
Orphée
is that Orphée, the consummate poet and visionary, is trapped in an ordinary domestic life that, for an artist of his caliber, is intolerable. The real issue for Orphée and, by extension, for any artist is to escape his earthly fate and make the jump into immortality. Cocteau has made the route to immortality abundantly clear. Only Death herself has the key to immortality.

WHEN I BEGAN WORK
on the Cocteau trilogy, the first idea that governed my work was to bring out the underlying themes of the three films. They are best described as a pair of dualities—life/death and creativity being the first; and the ordinary world and the world of transformation and magic being the second. These topics are at the core of all three works and are explicitly put forward in the films. Whereas the first trilogy of operas (
Einstein
,
Satyagraha
,
Akhnaten
) was about the transformation of society through the power of ideas and not through the force of arms, this second trilogy from the 1990s revolves around the transformation of the individual—the moral and personal dilemmas of a person as opposed to a whole people or society. A corollary to this is the way in which magic and the arts are used to transform the ordinary world into a world of transcendence. These three films of Cocteau are meant as a discussion, description, and instruction on creativity and the creative process.

My second purpose in making the trilogy was to effectively rethink the relationship of opera to film. The simplest statement of the idea, though not a complete one, is that instead of turning an opera into a film, I would be turning films into opera. In doing this, it would be necessary to turn around the conventions common to almost all filmmakers. The normal flow that guides the threefold process of pre-production, photography, and post-production is far from eternal truth, and the processes of filmmaking and opera writing offer powerful alternatives to conventional thinking. It is important to note that the accepted conventions have a good reason for being there. In that they are universally accepted, film production is made far easier for the large number of people who will be working together. The process does not need to be explained. It works well enough, and the film business can carry on efficiently just being what it wants to be—that is, a business. However, once that way of thinking is set aside, all kinds of other possibilities quickly appear. But this will happen well outside of the commercial framework, where the rules are set by the marketplace and the conventions of working are well-known.

Each of my approaches to the three films was different. For
Orphée
, I took the film script and treated it like a libretto. The movie is not shown—simply, the scenario of the movie is used to stage an opera, with singers, sets, and lighting. The stage director doesn’t reference the film at all. The staged version is fifteen minutes longer than the film version because it takes longer to sing a text than to speak it. Since I didn’t have to worry about fitting the libretto to the picture, I could let it be any length needed. Every line from the movie is included in the libretto, every scene from the movie is in the libretto, so in a real way, the libretto for the opera was by Cocteau.

Fittingly, almost every piece of music I wrote for
Orphée
comes directly out of each particular scene of the movie. For instance, in the opening scene in the café, Cocteau has someone playing a guitar, but that was much too tame for an opera. What was needed was a honky-tonk piano. I thought of it as if some piano player who plays honky-tonk music was sitting in the café and someone said, “Hey, play the piano for us!” because that’s the music you would hear if you were sitting in a café. The music provided for going to the Underworld has a bit of a funereal sound, but it’s also almost boogie-woogie music. For the two romantic duets for Orphée and La Morte (Death), one in Act 1 and one in Act 2, I was thinking of Puccini and Verdi, composers who wrote operatic love music. I thought, If I were a real opera composer, and I was about to write a romantic duet, what would it be? I wanted to write a modern love duet, and that was my version of it. I think the reason this opera is so popular is that the music composed for it was directly inspired by the film, and not by the myth.

Edouard Dermithe, who as a young man played both the role of Cégeste in
Orphée
(1949) and Paul, the male lead in
Les Enfants Terribles
(1950), was an elderly gentleman when I met him in the early 1990s. At that point, he was representing the Cocteau estate, and it was he who made the financial and legal arrangements for the rights that I would need to make the adaptations I had in mind. Though I took great pains to let him know, both in French and English, what I was intending to do, I’m not sure he really understood what the outcome would be. He was mainly concerned that the actual words were kept intact, which is what I did in both
Orphée
and
La Belle et la Bête
.

Since my work would be in French, no translation was needed. Finally, after a long three-hour lunch, we had an understanding, opened yet another bottle of wine, and toasted to the success of the new adaptations.

A few months later he sent me a typescript of the scenario of
La Belle et la Bête
.

“Please underline all the things that you cut,” he wrote on the cover.

I made a copy of the scenario with not even the slightest changes or marks and returned it to him the next day.

“It’s not necessary,” I wrote back. “Nothing from the movie was cut. No changes were made.”

I didn’t hear from him again for about a year. Early in 1994, he wrote me that he would be attending a performance of
La Belle et la Bête
during one of our European dates, but his car broke down en route and he never got there. As far as I know, he never did see any of the productions. Nor did I hear from him again.

AS A TRADITIONAL FAIRY TALE,
La Belle et La Bête
, the second opera of the trilogy, was an ideal vehicle for Cocteau’s symbolic-allegorical film. In Cocteau’s telling, La Bête is a prince who has been bewitched and transformed into a fearsome creature who can only be returned to his human form through the power of love. The young and beautiful Belle comes to live in La Bête’s chateau in order to save her father, who had stolen a rose from La Bête’s garden, from death. The first time Belle sees La Bête, she faints out of fear, but over time she becomes fond of him, though she still refuses his proposals of marriage. The plot progresses through a series of events involving the rose, a golden key, a magic mirror, a magic glove, and a horse named Magnifique. In the end, Belle is allowed to leave La Bête’s chateau to save her ill father, but she returns when she sees through the magic mirror that La Bête is dying of grief over losing her. When, through death, La Bête is transformed back into a prince, she flies away with him to his kingdom to become his queen.

My treatment of
La Belle et la Bête
was the most radical of the three works. I began by projecting the film as the visual aspect of the opera but turning off the soundtrack—music and speech—completely. I replaced the speech with singing parts, with all the other music also replaced. Technically this was not that hard to do, but it took a little time. I used the scenario from the film, timing every syllable, scene by scene. In using this method, the singers would only have the same amount of time to sing as the actor on the screen has to speak. Then I set up the music paper with bar-lines and metronome markings, also scene by scene.

After that, it was like hanging clothes on a clothesline. I began with the instrumental accompaniment, which was scored for my own ensemble. Now I knew where the vocal line needed to be and also, referring to the instrumental accompaniment, what the actual notes could be. After that was completed, we made a “demo” tape of the music in my studio and played it against the actual screen image. It seems my time working on
doublage
in Paris in the 1960s, almost thirty years before, had been more useful than I had ever anticipated. I knew from those years that the synchronization of image and sound did not have to be 100 percent throughout. In fact, all that was needed was a good moment of synchronization every twenty to thirty seconds. After that, the spectator’s own mind would arrange everything else. This gave a lot of flexibility in placing the sound on the lips. I also knew that words beginning with labial consonants such as
m
,
v
, or
b
in English and associated with the lips being closed were the best for those “synch” moments. Using these technical aids and the computer to adjust the sound to the image, Michael Riesman and I were able to fine-tune the vocal lines as needed. This was especially helpful because this score would be performed live with the film, and Michael would be the conductor.

At this point, in the mid-1990s, Michael had conducted Godfrey’s
Qatsi
films many times over the past ten years. It had quickly become clear that the live performances were more interesting and powerful when the synchronization of music to film was achieved visually—without the mechanical aid of a metronome or “click track” to guide the music. When the conductor visually matched the flow of music to the film, the effect was identical to a live performance (with the usual ebb and flow of the tempo) because it
was
a live performance. Over the years Michael had become so skillful with Godfrey’s films that I often noticed that these synchronized live performances were better than the pre-recorded version that one might see in a movie theater or at home on a DVD. From our point of view, the live performance raised the bar in terms of our expectations.

La Belle et la Bête
was set up with the ensemble sitting in front and below the screen facing Michael, who was standing facing the screen with his back to the public. The singers stood behind the ensemble, their heads just below the screen, also facing Michael. They were in concert dress, not looking at all like the actors in the film. They were lit from in front, but not so bright as to “white out” the screen image. At the beginning, the singers read the music from music stands, but after a few dozen performances, they hardly looked at the music.

This presentation had some surprising and unexpected results. We soon discovered that the audiences, for almost the first eight minutes, simply didn’t understand what was happening. They could see the film and the singers, but it took that long for them to understand that the voices of the singers had become the voices of the actors on the screen. There was a learning curve taking place and it happened without fail at every performance. Then, at almost exactly eight minutes into the film, the entire audience actually “saw it.” There could often be a collective audible intake of breath when that happened. From that instant on, the live singers and the filmed actors had merged into a double personae and stayed that way right through to the end of the singing and the last image of the film.

Before that last image, there is even a more intense moment when La Bête appears to be dying. At that moment, the audience is watching both Jean Marais, the onscreen Bête, and Greg Purnhagen, our singer, singing his words. I’ve watched that a hundred times and, at that moment, it is as if the two performances had perfectly merged. I have to admit I had no idea that this would happen, and it never fails to surprise me. But there it is—a merging of live and pre-recorded performances, both unexpected and powerful.