Autumn 1941. A handful of French writers on the platform of a Paris station. Cornish of the German officer Gerhard Heller (1909-1982), responsible for the literary affairs of the Propagandastaffel (“propaganda squad”), Marcel Jouhandeau, Jacques Chardonne and Ramón Fernández, among the most prominent writers under the occupation, attended the Weimar Poetry Meetings, where they were invited by D.r Goebbels (here his fictional double, Wolfgang Göbst) decides “The literature of the Europe of the future”. They will be joined along the way (Heidelberg, Augsburg, Munich, then Nuremberg, Bayreuth, Jena and finally Weimar) Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Robert Brasillach.
After The other side, created in 2006, then Akhmatovain 2011 at the Paris Opera, world premiere of Bruno Mantovani’s third opera, autumn trippresented at the Théâtre national du Capitole in Toulouse, continues to question artistic creation in the context of a dictatorship. If the first two works invoke figures of resistance (the Austrian engraver Alfred Kubin, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova), this time the French composer denounces those of collaboration. It is this descent into hell that is recounted by the librettist Dorian Astor, based on the book of the same name by the historian François Dufay, published by Plon in 2000. An authentic Faustian pact without redemption: Goethe’s Mephisto evidently serves as the common thread to this parable of the evil that leaves the listener with the impression of having attended, this Friday, November 22, the birth of a masterpiece.
A dark set showing travelers in hats and coats, some train seats. A mineral decoration hangs from the hangers and fills the space: a large square slab, of which a stone circle placed on the floor stands out. At the same time a conference table, political platform and place of fornication, it will disappear, but not without having been covered with a blue-white-brown flag, revealing in the excavated earth the horror of a well.
Columns of coal from locomotives, smoke from crematoriums, layers of fog pierced by beams of light: nothing explicit will be shown. Marie Lambert-Le Bihan’s refined staging draws its strength from a suggestion that is both monstrous and poetic. Only the relationship of homosexual fascination between Marcel Jouhandeau and Gerhard Heller draws an erotic trajectory that unfolds on a gigantic wrinkled white page.
You have 54.57% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
