TEMBOCTOU

Caillié is a living contradiction. The son of a convict and the first laureate of the Société de Géographie, he left to escape the villagers of Mauzé-sur-le-Mignon, but also to win their respect. A false Arab and a false scholar, in 1827 he was the first discoverer of a false glory : Timbuktu, a capital that had been reduced to a lethargic village. Whether it swallowed him up or agreed to spit him out moribund towards Europe, Africa was a “non-place”, a utopia for this small peasant of the Romantic age. The pioneer of Progress, hailed by science, was only pursuing the archaic image of Africa as a dangerous motherland. “Re-born”, like “René” Chateaubriand, and like the initiates, he embodies our two contradictory and universally frustrated postulations: the need for somewhere else, and nostalgia for home. The latter is identified by his sister Celeste, while the former resembles feminine mirages: a queen singing in Etruscan, or Lilith who vamps him… Today, when we see the field of travel shrinking to the dimensions of a skull, it is music and the theatre that remain the rare places open to the nomadism of the imagination. (…) The voices and instruments also nomad beyond their natural limits, thanks to a real-time digital processor, the DHM Publison, used here for the first time in a performance: the mirages of the Sahara are matched by mirages of sound.

Commentary

The first challenge I faced in this show was singing a text in French, which Da Capo, like Danaé and Les mangeurs d’ombre had radically avoided. The second was to avoid falling back into most of the conventions of opera. The third was to maintain the music’s leading role in the collective spectacle. Only the first two obstacles were more or less overcome. On the other hand, I did not succeed in pruning an overly wordy text, which breaks the rhythm of the show and bogs it down in the sands with its monologuing anti-hero. In this respect, the lessons of opera have not been put to good use, as the simplicity and sobriety of the dramatic situations have more often ensured the smooth running of a show than over-emphasised literary ambitions, which stop the momentum of the music. Busenello and Da Ponte succeeded in balancing their libretti with the music composed by Monteverdi or Mozart. But apart from these exceptions, many ordinary or schematic librettos did not lead to the downfall of their operas, and sometimes even contributed to their success. But the coupling of text and song is rarely achieved by consensus. The pairing of staging and music has become even riskier, as Ligeti found out the hard way with Le grand Macabre. Fortunately, my collaboration with Pierre Barrat was as easy and fruitful as it had been three years earlier.

Setting the text to music was based on a simple principle: first treat it as a phonetic model, following in the footsteps of what I had been trying to do since Safous Mélè. But instead of working out more or less arbitrary equivalences between the model and the writing, I started from my own recording of the text, pronounced with the rhythmic and intonational features that seemed useful to me. This reading by an amateur actor, oriented from the outset towards a transcription project, was then the subject of a meticulous analysis, to determine syllable by syllable the best approximation in stabilised mean pitches, to transcribe the ‘natural’ rhythms and accentuations closest to the expression of the content. All that remained was to adapt these data to the tessituras of the singers, and make a number of alterations.

Temboctou is more reminiscent of an oratorio than an opera, the challenge of returning after a disappointing discovery not allowing for any real dramatic progression. But the idea of a fantasised elsewhere is one that moves me. The mirages of the Sahara are matched by the mirages of sound.

To this end, while Ircam was developing the 4X system, used by Boulez in Répons in October 1981, the French infernal machine, as the DHM Publison was nicknamed, was a rather crude sampler, but which also allowed some manipulation in real time. It could, for example, create automatic arpeggios, invert normally spoken phrases, harmonise the voice of the solitary hero like a multiple choir, or broadcast shanai or zurna sounds on non-tempered scales. Still in this fantasy of an elsewhere, we could hear the Etruscan singer I had nicknamed Antinéa, a character played by Esther Lamandier who accompanied herself on a medieval harp. As an archaeologist, I had demonstrated my attraction to abolished voices by having the audience sing snatches of Lycian or Venetian, languages of which only rare written fragments have survived. An immense water drum, which I had made by Robert Hébrard on the enlarged model of African floating calabashes, emitted great resonances lower than any bass drum.
Temboctou may well have been my last theatrical work. The aesthetic reaction of the 1980s restored the conventions of opera, leading many composers to hope that it would reach a wider audience. A great deal of work has been, and still is being, invested, but if it is a calculation, it has often proved disappointing, although a small number of these operas are rightly regarded as successes. As in the past, the chances of new works entering the repertoire remain highly uncertain. Routine tastes, an indulgent past, and above all the enormous cost, keep opera in a fixed or precarious status. This courtly art is hardly compatible with the growing dictatorship of economic criteria, and Television, which would be one of the most appropriate media for renewing musical entertainment, confines itself to a few operettas renamed musicals, or to variety shows in which the music itself plays a secondary role.