Trilogie lyrique
Libretto by the composer after Maurice Maeterlinck
First performed October 8 2017, Deutsche Oper, Berlin
Sung in French with German & English surtitles
Introductory talks (in German) begin in the Holzfoyer 30 mins before curtain up and will appear here shortly after opening night
There's a chamber music concert at 11am on April 27 inspired by this work.
L’INTRUSE
While a mother’s recovering from the birth of her child, who isn’t as strong as it could be, her family start relaxing over supper. The doctor told them her life’s no longer in danger. Another relation’s expected who, strangely, hasn’t arrived, although footsteps keep being heard near the front door … When the animals in the garden fall silent too, the blind grandfather becomes aware of an intruder. The others dispute this vehemently, but the old man senses what’s happening in the next room: the mother dies at the same moment that her baby lets out its first cry.
INTÉRIEUR
Evening, in a village: a young woman who drowned in the river is found by the riverbank by a stranger. He and an older man must inform her family of their daughter’s death but hesitate, not wanting to ruin the family’s idyllic outing. While the stranger tells the old man how he recovered the body, Marie and Marthe, the old man’s grandchildren arrive, saying that the villagers are approaching with the dead body. Time’s running out. At Marthe’s insistence, the old man can’t put if off any longer and calls on the unsuspecting family, the others looking on while he breaks the news.
LA MORT DE TINTAGILES
Little Tintagiles has been summoned by his grandmother, an old Queen, to her castle. His sister Ygraine’s terrified that she wants to kill him as a potential heir to her throne, the same fate that befell Tintagiles’ father and two brothers. Ygraine plucks up courage, inciting her sister Bellangère and old Aglovale to take a stand. They manage to protect Tintagiles from the Queen’s servants for a while, but the boy’s stolen from them in a moment of deceptive calm. Ygraine, who followed him, can’t prevent Tintagiles’ death.
Death has many faces. Appearing as comforter, seducer, sadist. It shines in the dark and hides in the light.
Aribert Reimann’s L’invisible turned three Maeterlinck plays into a poetic meditation on the power of death: L’intruse shows a mother, struggling to survive after childbirth. While most of her relatives fail to grasp the seriousness of the situation, her blind grandfather’s the only one to register the arrival of an invisible stranger. Intérieur starts with a young woman’s suicide. Two men, expected to break the news to her family, wonder whether it wouldn’t be kinder to hide the bitter truth. La mort de Tintagiles harks back to a dismal fairy tale: an old Queen has her grandson Tintagiles brought to her kingdom to prevent him ever inheriting her throne by murdering him. His sisters put up a fight and try to protect him, but he vanishes without trace in his grandmother’s mysterious castle.
Maeterlinck’s late 19th century plays hover between realism and symbolic ambiguity. The everyday constantly invoking the valley of death, and omnipresent in Reimann’s score. The fears and premonitions of the characters are not only tangible in expressive vocal lines, but in iridescent orchestral interludes too. Richly contrasting instrumentation draws the three works together, producing something unforgettable.
