The Liceu is preparing to “reflect in capital letters” alongside Calixto Bieito with this opera by Hèctor Parra that arrives at the Rambla theater distilling the essence of Orgia, the theatrical classic by Pier Paolo Pasolini. A premiere long cherished by the Barcelona composer and which was released last year at the Arriaga Theater in Bilbao, as part of a co-production and co-commission with the Peralada Festival and the Gran Teatre. The only thing stopping him from starting to compose it was getting the rights. They were finally given to them by the heir to the legacy and Pasolini’s cousin, Graziella Chiarcossi.
“Luckily, no one else had the idea and we are still the first,” says Parra, in constant complicity with the desired stage director with whom he already made a lyrical version of Les Bienveillantes by Jonathan Littell, premiered at the Antwerp Opera in 2019, and previously Wilde, about an altruistic cooperating doctor who is corroded by selfishness and the most animalistic side of the human being. This first one was commissioned by the Schwetzingen Festival, in Germany, in 2015.
The appearance in Barcelona of what is the most international Catalan operatic tandem – and without a doubt the most extraordinary on the Iberian scene – will be in any case brief: their Orgia, that story about the sadomasochistic relationship of a married couple that ends with his suicide After assuming his homosexuality, he can only be seen on two days, the 11th and the 13th of this month. “At the moment we are at 60% occupancy, but we are more than satisfied to have Orgia as a sample of normality of the new creation,” said the artistic director of the theater, Víctor García de Gomar. We went through Turandots and Carmenes to be able to afford higher risk operations like this.”
“I have humbly tried to absorb all the classically created music that has been made after Schönberg,” warns Parra, for whom Pasolini is the Michelangelo of the 20th century. “It is not an expressionist opera but it does have a lot of expressionism. It drinks from the sonority that I worked at IRCAM, with electronics, stridency… and it has something Puccinian, because I remember the frescoes on the walls of Scarpia’s office [in the libretto of Tosca] which is the same one that the French ambassador has in Rome” .
Parra, who composed this piece in Rome during a residency at Villa Medici, assures that it is the best they have been able to give as a team with Bieito, who has also been in charge of distilling the essence of the play, taking fragments and without adding a single line. “This has allowed me to express emotions that I have not been able to express in other operas. It deals with the fragility of the human condition and where we set the limits within a relationship,” adds the composer.
Bieito, for his part, remembers that he is the artistic director of the Arriaga to make this type of creations and this type of contemporary commissions. “We believe that this is part of the future of our culture, of what our culture has to be. And that fantastic trio of Liceu-Arriaga-Perelada… is a great ménage à trois,” he laughs.
“When we talked about doing Orgia, I had not read or seen Pasolini films for many years. I had been a big fan and he had influenced me a lot, but I had so internalized him that I no longer even thought about him. I signed up to do that opera immediately. “Hèctor has done one of his best jobs. I don’t dare say the best but he has extraordinary strength and beauty.”
Calixto’s work went beyond staging. He had to “understand what the piece was.” “Because it’s not just about diversity, it’s a deeply humanist piece that shows the monster, the beast that some can carry inside.” For the regista, this piece is closely related to the last part of Salò, the film. “It connects with something that has to do with our cells and with the stars, that is, self-destruction. In his time of the trilogy of death Pasolini had frankly self-destructive tendencies with which we can all feel identified. And my job consisted of understand it and let myself be carried away by Hèctor’s music”.
“I don’t believe in posterity. I see the pigeons shitting on Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße in Berlin and no, I don’t believe. But I do believe in legacy. And this piece will become a classic over time,” he says. the theater director.
Bieito is once again happy to set foot in the Barcelona theater. More, at least, than when he premiered his montage of Monteverdi’s Poppea last season, with which the musical director Jordi Savall showed disagreements. This time, however, the communion is total. And it has three singers, Ausriné Stundyté, Christian Miedl and Jone Martínez, “who are artists,” he emphasizes, “artists in the sense that they are capable of projecting their inner fantasies and dreams and letting them flow, something that sometimes appears even without realizing it.” realize that they are doing it.
At first it was difficult for Bieito to understand what Pasolini meant. “He tried to do theater della parola but he was not happy. He was not very interested in theater. I even made three different cuts of the piece to adapt it to the libretto, because the issue of diversity confused me. I did not think that the issue “It was a man who was married and who was gay. He was talking about much deeper things.” And he continues: “I could have pointed to fashion and placed it on the issue of diversity, but here it speaks of the roots of evil, of the monster that we carry inside. Of a fascist attitude of when one harshly hits a woman or a mother hits harshly to his son.
The set design wants to be the interior of a home of a traditional upper-middle class family that could be located in Rome, Barcelona, ??Madrid… although due to the distribution of elements it seems more like a furniture store. “It is an installation of the life of that family. The elements are systematically placed in the same space, like in a museum. You could enter and place the images you wanted. I leave it open,” explains the stage director.
The working method between composer, librettist and musical director, none other than Pierre Bleuse, director of the Ensemble InterContemporain, who will lead the Liceu Orchestra, has been more of a complicity without words. “First come the images and then the words between the three of us,” assumes Bieito.
It was working with him that Parra discovered that his music had something human that he had not perceived until then: it had blood in the veins, muscle, tendons and ligaments, the musician notes. “I have forged myself as an opera composer with him. Because it is something very beastly for a composer to see his work on stage and embodied by singers. And in this case we have embodied the theater of Pasolini’s parola with a lyrical voice. Because it is very operable Orgia, is a Greek tragedy with totally poetic writing, short and concentrated phrases… And Calixto has removed all the most philosophical and political part and has achieved the essence of the play.”
Bleuse conducts an orchestra of 24 musicians, among which there is no shortage of an archlute and a sarabande, so there is no shortage of elements of early music in combination with the special sound and electronic nuances that are typical of Parra and his work in the IRCAM of Paris. “Hèctor brings out magical colors with a look at the past and at that baroque tradition from which strength comes, although with modern and contemporary knowledge,” says the musical director. And he concludes: “He is one of the composers who knows how to handle voices, he has that sense of lyric and he shows it in a lyric filled to the brim with poetry. When I conduct your music,” he adds, addressing Parra, “I see perfectly how they face the dark side.” and violent with the sublime beauty that integrates the past and does not reject the history of music.
