Moby Dick under the harpoon of Olga Neuwirth

Concerts 29.09.2022

It is with the entire crew of the Pequod that Olga Neuwirth embarks us on the deck of the whaler where her music hits us in the face like the Pacific wave. With the forces of the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Orchestre du Conservatoire de Paris under the direction of Matthias Pintscher, The Outcast, inspired by Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick, is given its French premiere at the Philharmonie de Paris.

The spatial configuration of the Grande Salle Pierre Boulez has been significantly modified to accommodate the stage set-up of The Outcast, a work that the composer defines as "musicstallation - theater with video". There is no staging as such, but costumed characters who speak and sing at the front of the stage and two choirs placed at different levels: 24 men(Company of music) behind the orchestra and 24 boys wearing masks(München Knabenchor), placed in an overhang, forming a clear spot (like a sand dune or sea foam) in an overall very dark context. Three ladders can be seen at the back of the stage and halyards criss-cross the space, reminding us that the story takes place on the open sea and on a boat. The images - those of Netia Jones - are projected on five panels of different sizes, perhaps representing the archipelago of the Enchanted Islands, another adventure novel by Melville mentioned in the booklet. The video (marine atmospheres, clusters of figures, tormented skies, but also characters filmed in close-up) is an integral part of the dramaturgy, like an additional layer to the text and the music that it superbly counterpoints.

If Olga Neuwirth tells us a story, the catastrophic one of the whaler Pequod and its crew, the narration is in no way linear, more like a scenario, so much so that the technique of elaboration evokes the cinema that the composer knows well for having studied its mechanisms. To the libretto, in English, for which she called upon the writer Barry Gifford, are added the monologues of Old Melville written by Anna Mitgutsch. Melville, in the twilight of his life, becomes a central character (actor Johan Leysen) in The Outcast , which brings out that part of the theater that Neuwirth wants to bring out. Installed in the garden in front of his keyboard, he lends himself to long solitary reflections on the idea of death, the meaning of his own life, tackling other existential questions that animate his mind as well as Neuwirth's: greed, the thirst for power, ecological disaster... digressions (always supported by electronics or the light texture of the strings) that do not exclude humor or even irony, and whose length may seem excessive, excess being always an expressive spring for the composer! She herself adds other texts (by Lautréamont, Lewis Carroll, Walt Whitman, etc.) and introduces an alien soul to the novel of Moby Dick, the whimsical Bartleby (role sung and played by a woman). Bartleby is the anti-hero of the eponymous short story written by Melville two years after Moby Dick, a strange character who escapes all forms of alienation with the formula, "I would prefer not to". 

The work in three parts and sixteen linked scenes immediately plunges us into a highly reverberated sound space where the hybridization of materials (instruments and electronics) and style - "multi-sensorial and with drawers" - reigns supreme, as the composer likes to say. Within the orchestra, which concentrates a consequent string section, one hears an electric guitar, whose each soloist intervention flirts with jazz, a sampler mixing its foreign bodies with the timbres of the orchestra and a liturgical organ, for the sermon scene in particular, where Father Mapple (spoken role), during his generous preaching supported by the string outfits and the high frequencies of the electronics, reminds us of the biblical story of Jonah punished by God and reclined in the belly of the whale. The orchestra is often impulsive in its interventions, the writing featuring the trumpet (the composer's instrument) heard through the filter of numerous mutes. 

The journey begins with a cheerful sailor's song interpreted by the boys' choir, pure timbre and clear register that contrast with the very hybridized orchestral sound and bring us back in the wake of the Pequod at each intervention. As for the eight soloists who sing at the edge of the stage, they concentrate as many colors and vocal specificities as personalities. Among the quintet of the crew, all of whom are out to kill the white whale, Queequeg the harpooner - "not a hair on his head, except for a sort of braided skull knot on his forehead", writes Melville in Moby Dick - stands out with his counter-tenor voice, the radiant voice ofAndrew Watts, fetish interpreter of theTribute to Klaus Nomi written by Neuwirth in the same year 2010. One is hardly surprised to hear, through his voice and the orchestra that echoes its articulation, Purcell's famous "cold air", anamorphosed in this foreign context. Pip, the cabin boy and his tambourine, who escapes drowning but loses his mind, is a child's voice (David Schilde), touching in the fragility of his intonation. It is the only one to move Ahab/OttoKatzameier, the captain of the Pequod through whom all evils come and against whom Old Melville revolts: "The world is a warship where some arrogate to themselves a divine power and the others are their victims," he tells us in substance. The voice of the baritone, to whom Neuwirth reserves some very beautiful solos, is wide and richly timbred. Far from being monolithic, the baritone discovers a sumptuous high register of great expressivity where all the nuances of this complex personality pass. Stubb (baritone Peter Brathwaite) and Starbuck (tenor Johannes Bamberger) also have their own words to say in this chronicle of life on board where the vocality marries the accents of the English language. They rebel against the captain's xenophobia and his madness for revenge, trying in vain to stop him in his obsessive project to kill the white whale that once tore off his left leg. If we hear, not without humor, Ahab exchanging with the old Melville (superb Johan Leysen) in the third part, the two female characters are also in phase with the writer, each one considering himself as his double or his alter ego. Ishmael(a) - the narrator in Moby Dick - is played by the soprano Susanne Elmark, assuming both a spoken role and an often dizzying lyrical part. The voice is as flexible as it is luminous, free in its emission and with a great homogeneity of tone. The intermittent appearances of Bartleby/AnnaClementi, another pariah figure who seems to taunt her interlocutor, do not miss their effect: a slightly nasal voice close to the music-hall, set with ad hoc instrumental sounds - trumpet, synthesizer and teasing electric guitar - transposing musically and marvelously this "nonchalant disobedience" (according to the words of Laurent Feneyrou) which she maintains.

We catch up with the story in the third part ("the black sea") where Neuwirth evokes the swell of the ocean first - a very beautiful choral page entirely vocalized - then the fight of the Pequod with the white whale, an impressive scene where the sound of the orchestra stylizing the wave and the flow of the image progressively passing from the black and white to the red color interpenetrate...
The epilogue takes place under a blue sky with light white clouds, an Edenic kingdom where Old Melville, the boys' choir and Ishmaëla singing her message of peace in a last air of distraught lyricism: "Why don't we behave like the clouds that slowly cross the sky...".

The work - a masterpiece - is defended tooth and nail by a team, video artist and technicians, choirs, soloists and orchestra, in close synergy to articulate all the components of this proposal as ambitious as it is firmly mastered by the master on board, Matthias Pintscher; The Outcast is this world-work of a composer who intends to confront the reality of her time with an impetus and a commitment that forces admiration.

Michèle Tosi

Photos © Quentin Chevrier
Photos © Anne-Elise Grosbois

Related

buy twitter accounts
betoffice