Joan Fontcuberta was engaged in this search for images deteriorated by fungi that he makes in archives around the world when the Liceu proposed to him to become the fourth artist who, without having music as his own discipline, dialogues in the theater de la Rambla with Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (Winter Journey). The photographer, visual artist and essayist from Barcelona has long been busy with these phantasmagorias that mark his recent work and which also constitute a poetic exercise on the degradation of memory. A question that connects in a very special way with this cycle of 24 poetic songs that Schubert composed in 1828 on poems by Wilhelm Müller. The pairing will take place tomorrow (7.30 p.m., single performance) with baritone Michael Volle and Helmut Deutsch’s piano.
Unlike the readings they did of Winterreise in previous seasons, the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, the Preljocaj Ballet, Antonio López (among the bars of the Model) or, previously, William Kentridge at the Palau de la Música, the artist who illustrates the current season book of the Gran Teatre still this key work in the history of music establishing a parallel between the walker who suffers from heartbreak and abandons himself to sadness and the Alzheimer’s patient who lets go the moorings of memory. And they die
Fontcuberta has had two painful experiences with very close cases of Alzheimer’s “that have hurt me, they have impressed me – he explains -; I’ve experienced it with great drama and surely this leads me to embody it in the things I’m doing”. Thus, despite respecting the prominence of music and poetry, his Winterreise has a common thread that aims to intensify the feeling of melancholy and agony, “this path towards solitude and darkness – he says -; only that in this case it is not given, as in the poem, by the loss of a love, but by the loss of contact with the world caused by the degenerative pathologies of memory”.
A cyclorama with Fontcuberta’s work frames this semi-staged proposal in which stage director Anna Ponces uses an actor (alter ego of the baritone) and two actresses, who represent the woman and the caregiver in this new Schubertian imaginary. “The characters – says Ponces – are naturalistic and start with a more objective idea of ??reality, but the action has more to do with a subjective film plan, because we are interested in explaining the subjectivity of the character. The voice of the poems and the singer represent the mental world of the protagonist’s pain, his inner confusions.
The proposal is interdisciplinary and has a third guest, Susanna Rafart (Ripoll, 1962), resident poet of the Liceu, who has written poems to accompany the show. Taking as a basis those of Müller, the abstraction of Fontcuberta and the fragmented vision of reality that people who suffer from this cognitive impairment have, Rafart creates a symbolic universe about romantic abandonment and madness.
“Meeting Müller’s poems was a challenge – explains Rafat-. He should not be considered a minor poet, in fact, Heinrich Heine considered him the great modernizer of popular poetry and a fresh language. We start from here and also from the idea of ??the final poem, Der Leiermann (The organ player), the artist to whom no one pays attention and who is a producer of romanticism and the vision of the solitary artist who runs away , which is not loved and which has gone through so many states throughout our culture, from the figure of Lo cornamusaire by Jacint Verdaguer to the saltimbanqui of Rusiñol or Picasso, or for example Bob Dylan… And my poems come to be small chords that are lost in the sound of this desolate landscape that is the snow and want to be a discreet counterpoint to Müller’s, which transits towards Fontcuberta’s more conceptual abstraction, in which the walker is a symbol of the vital acceleration that leads us, in our century, to collective amnesia”.
And there is one more coincidence in the Fontcuberti Winterreise. And it is that, invited by the Italian Ministry of Culture, the artist rummaged through his photographic archives and requested access to all the material in poor condition in which, as he insists, “the fungi invade the memory and eat it, a process which gives rise to a superimposition of landscapes: that of reality which is attacked by this landscape of bacteria that feed on organic components of the photographic gelatin”.
The point is that he was lucky enough to find a box with stereoscopic landscapes of the Alps made by Prince Francesco Chigi Albani della Rovere, a military aristocrat who as a young man was a great dilettante of photography and mountaineering, and in the change century he took many alpine pictures. “Precisely that part suffered the inclement weather of a flood, which gave rise to this type of magical landscape in which there is an almost cosmic, sidereal dust, which reminds us of the Élevage de poussière (The dust nursery) by Duchamp, that masterpiece of modernity in which the artist allows dust to settle on a plate of glass as a symbol of passing time, abandonment, loneliness… as in Winterreise ” .
It fit like a ring on the finger to represent Schubert’s cycle. What’s more, using AI they have recreated old portraits of couples on holiday in the Alps with the faces of the baritone and the actress playing the woman.
