Luigi Cherubini : Medea

 

 

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Ce Medea est magnifique dans sa réalisation et par la présence de Anna Caterina Antonacci, qui en plus d'une voix magnifique possède un sens dramatique digne de la tragédie grecque . Dans cette œuvre elle est bien entourée ce qui porte l'œuvre à un très haut niveau. Mérite d'être connu...

This opera is a masterpiece and this particular production is so surprisingly creative that we are flabbergasted by every little twist and warp in the plot line, not that this production invents those twists and warps but because it uses them fully that are in the music or the singing.

The general setting is amazing. Some kind of rocky seaside coast with the sea in the back. On that coast the Argo is brought in the middle of the first act to stay. This ship will be the very symbol of the Argonauts, hence all the context behind the plot, but also the locale of the drama. From a boat bringing the Golden Fleece back from Colchis it will become the heart of the drama in the second act since it will be the living though abandoned witness of the love affair and marriage between Jason and Medea, a Medea who is abandoned just like the ship is and both by Jason. In the third act it will be the seat of a tempest at the beginning and then of the furious eruption of hellish fire and the supernatural descent into hell. At the end the ship is hanging over the stage in mid air.

This visualization of the plot is great. It also chooses to set the action in some kind of bourgeois late 19th century society. That is in a way funny, though slightly distorting or anachronic. The two women at the beginning are two simple servants, no more than anonymous women. Here they become some kind of second rank bourgeois women. The servants themselves have uniforms. But this is secondary, though I find this opening scene too explicit as for that time reference. It becomes a lot lighter and timeless later.

The composition in general is systematically elaborate and rich from beginning to end. No recitatives. The dramatic nature of the language is systematically embodied in couples or at most triads of people singing at the same time. Are they singing together? When it is Jason and Glauce in the first act, yes though Glauce is expressing a great fear and Jason is trying to reassure her that he will be faithful. But all the other couples or triads are systematically confrontations but these confrontations can be of two types: real confrontational dialogues that are more arguments than duets, or parallel monologues that sound like duets but are not. They sing either against each other or one on top of the other or one under the other or inverting the order constantly backward and forward; upward and downward. This very brutal confrontational style corresponds of course to the situation.

Brutal it has to be between Jason and Medea in the first act, and again, though shorter in the second act, and yet in that case he nearly got tricked by Medea, and of course savagely brutal at the end of the third act. Brutal it has to be when it is Medea who confronts Cleon about a one day delay and the children, and she is such a good liar that he yields. In the third act when Medea is with the children and Neris the brutal confrontation is between the two sides of Medea, the mother and her natural maternal love on one side and the vengeful betrayed wife on the other side. Neris in this scene is just some kind of protection for the children and sinister messenger at the very end to announce the death of the children.

One exception to this confrontational style is the long extremely sad monologue of Neris in the second act where she compares her fate as a slave who has no real personal home to go to and the fate of an exile who has to go everywhere and stop nowhere. This long monologue is not an aria. It is a deeply mournful dirge that reflects the time when this opera was composed, 1797 in Paris. The slaves can always rebel, they will never be able to get free and Medea is a foreigner, is a barbarous non-Greek person and hence is an ethnic slave just as Neris who is also from Colchis is a social slave. Slaves from all over the world unite! A beautiful dream that ends in blood.

And yet there is a lot more in this production. They have tried to center it on normal people, hence they have materialize the magic or dramatic elements and they even demonstrate the opening of the knife and it is caressed by Medea as if it were some pet. That acting gives to the characters a tremendous humanity, perverted humanity maybe yet humanity all the same, so that the final crime that is so revolting in many ways and is duly punished by the damnation of Medea and later Jason who will meet on the bank of the Styx makes the barbaric act the result of passion, love, betrayal, male chauvinism and female vengefulness. In a way it becomes human and it is a simple ordinary familiar act like all those we can see in the press everyday about a father killing his wife and all his children and either killing himself last or disappearing into thin air.

That play, that opera, that acting, that production are the absolute demonstration that man is not good originally and by principle, but ambiguous, ambivalent and that circumstances might make him or her lean towards good or towards evil. There is nothing divine or satanic in that, just plain human nature. Ronald Lafayette Hubbard can proclaim "The basic nature of Man ... is discovered to be good." (Dianetics, page 11), he is wrong. The basic nature of man is animal, entirely leaning towards survival, by absolutely any means available, with no ethical consideration, because ethics come later as Hubbard says too "with observation, education and viewpoint" (idem, page 23).

I think this opera by Cherubini is definitely modern in tone and intention and that is visible in the various alterations performed in the story by the librettist that took Medea quite a long way away from Euripides, and even more Senecca, not to speak of Pierre Corneille or Thomas Corneille, though this last one was saved by Marc-Antoine Charpentier's music.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

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