[READING] BERIO ON THE IDEA OF MUSICAL THEATER

Opéra National de Paris. Pelléas et Mélisande – Elena Tsallagova (Mélisande), Stéphane Degout (Pelléas), Stage set up by Bob Wilson, 2012  © Charles duprat

 

"We are close to an idea of musical theater that is a theater of the mind and memory, perhaps a virtual theater, a theater that invites our attention to constantly oscillate between listening and looking and back again, a theater that constructively challenges those who watch and those who listen, that arouses the desire to listen with one's eyes and look with one's ears. Eyes that can listen to different things from the same perspective and ears that may see only one thing, but from different perspectives. In other words, we are thinking of a theater made intelligible not only by the things we see and hear, but also by the desire to penetrate, discover, and confuse the different times of sounds and images.

Seeing music. The need to seek a link between image and sound comes from far away, from an ancient synesthetic vision of the world. Exodus 20:18: “And all the people saw the thunder and lightning and the sound of the shofar.”

The link between light and sound, between light and speech, is common to almost all stories of origins, primordial events, myths, and world consciousness, and music often seems to become the most powerful intermediary between the eye and the ear, between the moving and extreme points of a space that must always be explored and questioned anew. A space that sometimes seems to lead us to the threshold of a mystery. A space that we also try, with the tools of theater, to explore and stubbornly secularize, but which, in fact, always contains an intangible and perhaps sacred core."

Luciano Berio, "Des sons et des images (1995)"