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ROME, Nov. 18 - Aging rockers
don't fade away; nor, apparently, do their followers. So two decades
after Roger Waters broke with Pink Floyd, as bassist, lead singer and
composer, fans flew here from across Europe to hear his latest
creation. And it seemed to matter little that he had written a
19th-century-style opera called "Ça Ira," or "There Is Hope."
Before the semistaged
concert premiere began on Thursday in Renzo Piano's new Auditorium
Parco Della
Musica, Mr. Waters was received with whoops and cheers as he welcomed
the public in halting Italian. Then, at the intermission and the
curtain call, there was more enthusiastic applause for the cast as well
as for the composer, at 62 still a striking figure with flowing gray
locks.
True, one young Englishwoman
wondered, "I don't understand why an opera about the French Revolution
is being sung in English in Rome." But she quickly added, "You can hear
lots of Pink Floyd in it: the children's choir, the bird sounds."
Well, perhaps. Still, if Mr.
Waters can draw young audiences to an opera - one far more mainstream
than Pink Floyd's quasi-operatic album, "The Wall" - he is already
achieving more than most contemporary composers. By his own admission,
he leaned on Brahms, Puccini and Prokofiev for inspiration.
The work is written for full
orchestra and chorus, and if staged, it would require 12 solo singers.
In a Sony Classical recording released in September, the baritone Bryn
Terfel, the tenor Paul Groves and the soprano Ying Huang each sang
several roles. Here John Relyea and Keel Watson replaced Mr. Terfel,
and Mr. Groves and Ms. Huang were joined by five other singers.
How Mr. Waters came to write this
opera dates back to the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution in
1989, when a friend, the French lyricist Étienne Roda-Gil, showed him a
libretto, illustrated with drawings by Mr. Roda-Gil's wife, Nadine. It
covered the period from early 1789 to Marie Antoinette's execution in
1793.
"I fell in love with the original
manuscript in French," Mr. Waters said in an interview in Paris some
weeks before the premiere. "I spoke enough French to get it. I liked
the idea embodied in it, that 200
years ago, people sat around and decided not only that the ancien
régime had had its day but that people should have rights - but not
just the French, people everywhere."
Mr. Waters promptly prepared a
short demonstration tape, which, he said, President François Mitterrand
of France heard and liked. Then nothing happened, and the project was
shelved for almost a decade. Eventually, Mr. Waters and Mr. Roda-Gil
resumed work and recorded a section with an orchestra. That won over
Sony, which, however, insisted on an English-language version as well
as the French one.
What made this project doubly
unusual was that Mr. Waters could not read music when he began writing
"Ça Ira." In his Pink Floyd days, he composed by singing and
improvising with instruments. But here he could count on computer
programs that enabled him to write the score. Rick Wentworth, a British
musicologist who conducted the Roma Sinfonietta on Thursday, helped him
with orchestration.
"So I didn't need to be able to
sit down at a piano with a pencil and a piece of manuscript," Mr.
Waters said. "I don't sight-read. If you sit me down with a piece for
the piano, I can't play it, but I can now tell you what the notes are."
The libretto, which Mr. Waters
expanded and adapted to English, inevitably shapes the score, since it
imagines the story being recounted and re-enacted in a circus. The
Ringmaster provides the principal
narrative, and different players, notably Louis XVI and Marie
Antoinette, either watch events unfold from a box or enter the arena
themselves.
But because the libretto is
trying to cover so much ground, from the hungry masses and the
gluttonous court before Bastille Day to the guillotining of first king,
then queen, the narrative imposes a kind of declamatory recitative that
leaves little room for soaring arias or even catchy duets and trios.
Only occasionally do the chorus and orchestra slow the pace.
And since Mr. Waters and Mr.
Roda-Gil, who died last year, both appear consumed by the ideals
contested in the Revolution, the opera's characters are more symbolic
than real: not least, Marie Marianne, sung here by Ms. Huang, as the
personification of the French Republic. So this is an opera without a
love story, and as operagoers know, that can be a problem.
The music certainly has echoes of
Puccini ("Tosca" is Mr. Waters's favorite opera) and Prokofiev (Mr.
Waters said he had had in mind Prokofiev's score for Eisenstein's movie
"Ivan the Terrible"). Reviewing the Sony recording in The New York
Times, Allan Kozinn said he was reminded of Claude-Michel Schönberg's
music for "Les Misérables," and some Italian critics drew a parallel
with the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber.
A full staging of the opera would
no doubt add raucous scenes and rich costumes, but images projected
onto a large screen above the chorus helped give context to the story
here. Some were historical paintings
and drawings; others, recent photographs evoking a circus and using
actors to depict Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
"We're pretending we're
projecting photographs of a production," Mr. Waters said, "a visual
representation of my idea of a production."
But for the moment, a staging
remains an idea. More likely, Mr. Waters said, are fresh concert
versions in other cities. Why did Rome come first? "It was simple," Mr.
Waters said. "Flavio Severini, the artistic
adviser of the Musica per Roma Foundation, has always been a fan of my
work. He wanted to do it. We did the sums, and it worked out."
This interview is posted here purely for archiving purposes, and copyright remains with the originating publication.
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