In the waiting room for happiness: At the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Christof Loy is once again staging a cleverly psychologised 20th century women’s story: Gustave Charpentier’s ‘Louise’.
Paris! A dream. The city of lights, grand boulevards and the glamorous life that they themselves will never lead is the vision of the poor seamstresses, shop assistants and kitchen helpers who pour into the metropolis from the suburbs every day, even today. Louise in Gustave Charpentier’s opera, which premiered in 1900, also dreams this dream, just as Chekhov’s Three Sisters from the Province strive ‘to Moscow’ or Irmgard Keun’s arty-silky girl wants to be ‘a splendour’ in Berlin.
In Etienne Pluss’ stage set in the courtyard of the Archevêché of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, Paris only shimmers wearily through the greasy glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows. It shows a waiting room – a waiting room for happiness, which is not really made for such simple working-class girls. Christof Loy once again cleverly psychologises how family security turns into captivity, affection turns into abuse and the dream of escape proves to be a transference.
Mother and daughter Louise are sitting on the long bench in the waiting room; you might think they are waiting for the results of their father’s illness. The production is best understood backwards, from the end: it is obviously the psychiatric ward to which the parents have taken their child. Everything we see in between, the banter with the colleagues in the sewing studio, the romance with the Noctambule, a kind of artist – of life, and the big artists’ party in Montmartre, are memories or even just dreams that haunt her again while they wait. When the attending doctor becomes recognisable as the very same Noctambule, one has to fear that even this love was just the infatuation of a mentally unstable girl for her doctor and saviour.
Of course, Louise was also quite deliberately brought into this unstable state. By her mother anyway, who keeps herself more elegant than her petit bourgeois status would allow. Behind her buttoned-up attitude there is a palpable desire for life that has never been fully satisfied, in fact the same desire for Paris that she was never allowed to fulfil alongside a small wage labourer and which she now does not grant her daughter.
She is basically jealous of her daughter, also because of the affection her father shows her. So she keeps her short and even beats her. She symbolically closes the shutters in the waiting room so that the lights of Paris do not penetrate like the voices. Sophie Koch plays the mother with precision and nuance in this mixture of rigour and her own lust; vocally, her mezzo now has more vibrato than before, but that suits this harsh character.
It is enchanting that Loy then knows how to fill Louise’s dream of happiness with life. Just a moment ago, her colleagues were teasing the strict and modest girl for her first love, causing her to flee into the closet. But her Charming Prince, dressed in tails and top hat, Parisian life personified, came and took her as his wife in the white wedding dress of all girls’ dreams. When she sings her ‘Depuis le jour’, raving about how everything has changed since that first night of love, to a movingly simple melody, it gets under your skin.
Elsa Dreisig has retained the sweet, lyrically beautiful sound of her voice. Her soprano can still sound as dreamlike and light as Louise does at the beginning. In the act of love, it now becomes sensually full and luminous, and even holds its own when the part becomes increasingly dramatic towards the end. However, it cannot be denied that the voice seems strained at the end. Let’s hope she remains cautious with anything even more dramatic!
And Loy can also party. For the artists’ festival, a few garlands of flags and tricolour balloons turn into a colourful celebration of life thanks to all the quirky characters, at which Louise is crowned the muse of Montmartre. With the national flag flying on the eve of the bank holidays on 14 July, this has something of the traditional firemen’s balls that are still celebrated today to mark the occasion, and Charpentier (and Loy) bring the signal trumpet on stage with them.
It’s terrifying when the mother appears and forces Louise back into the family by pointing out her father’s illness. It is the eternal trap. The staff sweep up the remains of the party as if it had been a company party at the hospital. And the father takes possession of Louise on his lap, with all the assault we already suspected in the first act. But now played out drastically. And all the more terribly so because Louise herself is so absorbed in the abuse that she is the one who erotically provokes the father, virtually confusing him with her lover. What ends with libeation in Charpentier’s libretto – he finally lets her leave the family – becomes a desperate leap out of the window in Loy’s version. Then the final image: she comes out of the treatment room, finally broken and at the mercy of her parents.
That is a shocker. Loy cleverly leaves open what was the cause and what was the effect of this psychological deformation. His narrative style is certainly exciting. However, it can also be criticised that he once again establishes the woman as the victim, whereas Charpentier, like Ibsen with Nora and the Lady of the Sea, shows emancipation at the turn of the 19th century. Charpentier’s Louise escapes family constraints, and she does not necessarily go to the Noctambule, but she will possibly find her own way in the knowledge of the right to freedom and happiness she has learnt from him.
Adam Smith as Noctambule is a suitably stately figure with a self-confident but often somewhat punchy tenor, where one would wish for a more mellifluous voice. Nicolas Courjal plays the father with a lanky charm, switching excitingly between tenderness, assault and horror. Having lost his daughter in the meantime, he has apparently become a complete alcoholic and then a troublemaker who rants about the decadent big city. With a large, but also rather vibrato-rich bass-baritone, he is able to characterise the abysses of a once certainly highly sought-after type for women.
Many of the soloists, chorus and orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon, where the production will be performed at the end of January, are held together with a stringent hand by Giacomo Sagripanti. Charpentier’s music is a dream, especially when he sings about Paris and the freedom of love, the right of people to self-determination. Paris beats to the beat as in Brel’s ‘Valse à mille temps’, the city with all its diverse voices calls Louise to life. The opera, composed in a continuing flow like Wagner’s, is otherwise written along the lines of the French language, discussing, revelling, celebrating and leading to dramatic upsurges. The symphonic preludes are marvellous, in the beginning like in Puccini’s ‘Tosca’. At the end, it still bubbles up like in ‘Tristan’, the leitmotif from the duet with the Noctambule resounds again, the choral call of the city, of freedom. Unfortunately, in Loy’s version this freedom seems a dream which becomes not true.