I went to listen “I am her mouth" by the Dutch Composer Jan van de Putte who lives in France.
The opera begins with a very long solo from the mezzo-soprano, interacting with a basic scenography: a door, a rectangular arc with multiple functions, a piano, a glass of water and a bottle. Everything single object from stage becomes necessary in van de Putte language. The music starts “eating” the scenography elements to make them indispensable: the piano, the water… they all have their own density and behave musically. Also the lighting.
The singer starts mumbling some notes and throwing out coins on the floor, dragging her feet (everything was very precise, I am sure written in the score) … her long way finishes in the piano … she plays a note, casually the same she is singing … ja ja ja! Great!
How much I wished in that moment to have written that music myself! I almost jump into stage for bowing at the end of the concert, so inside I was into this music (specially with the first part of the opera). How happy I was watching that combination of voice, piano, little coins, far away little lamp coming from a half open door…
The singer playing the piano says the word “piano”… there is a very complex combination of resources by means of simple elements … for some reason that putting all those things together was making me literally cry under a deep emotion, except when I had to stop crying for laughing of the jokes… to be a responsible audience is not easy!!!
I am doing something similar with my piece Gespleten piano ( I mean this complex combinatoryo of simple elements)… the only difference is that the piano piece is still in the score and the opera was going on on real time… just beautiful, reading my own mind on stage...
In one moment the mezzo starts naming the parts from her body: nose, eyes, mouth simultaneously pointing them… she seemed a person "out of herself" who is naming her own body members from an outside (her own mouth, her own voice) it remainded me that kind of logic that crazy people have. She is not only starts repeating the names but enunciating also the act of repetition “I repeat: nose, eyes, etc, etc)
Latter she names the musical actions from the performers putting herself with this act apart from the scene: bow up, bow down, pianissimo, pianississimo… etc…
She is being inside, outside the comedy of the concert. We, audience, are somewhere else... inside? with our own emotions?
water, piano, voice…
I think in "c’est en pipe"… this is a concert, this is an audience …
This enunciation would sink us into a world of intellectual speculation if it wasn’t somehow joyful! I was laughing -with my mind- about something I didn’t know exactly what it was, but it was certainly funny… But we won’t want to explain the jokes… and I think Jan van de Putte neither.More than Dostoyevsky the opera reminds me Lewis Carroll (the opera was in English, it helps to the association!) The text was literally playing with riddles, counting, and rhythmical repetitions
Ideas, ideas, ideas… lot of them all the time... mind puzzles, ear puzzles...
Suddenly a new door opened in the opera form with the apparition of the musical instruments and the opera was set immediately into a different place. This new world of harmonies by the piano and string quartet was somehow more “operatic", and in certain way more predictable… Vibrato, certain vocal nostalgia post romantic… In that moment I abandoned myself to the flowing of music because the music was already “done”. Becoming a lazy audience is just round the corner. And then, all the sudden, the piece was gone.
I wish the opera was longer (I mean really longer, 4 hours or more) but anyway, even in a small dose it was a deep emotion to listen to it.