What better metaphor than that of travel to unfold the narrative thread of an opera that connects two major works by Dante Alighieri, The new life et The divine Comedy ? From the original texts – with the exception of a few liturgical passages in Latin –, Frédéric Boyer establishes, in seven paintings and as many initiatory stages, the cartography of a crossing underpinned by the aspiration to transcendence. The Journey, Dante tells, and it is there, much more than in the language of the Florentine writer, on which Pascal Dusapin has done, with the mezzo-soprano Christel Loetzsch, a beautiful work of prosody, that the resistance likely to be opposed to the opera genre by such a literary universe.
As Virgil guides Dante, a Narrator – Giacomo Prestia – leads us on this journey like a showbiz storyteller. The narrative, to which the video superimposes its own narrative layer, nevertheless takes up a place which at times seems destined to fill that left by the dramaturgy of the text. As suggested by the Hell Map, by Botticelli, hung on a section of wall, the elements which move apart to gradually deepen the depth of the scene accompany a dive into the circles of the cone leading to Lucifer, before regaining the light. The perspective thus opened up between the “dark forest” and Hell is devilishly effective even if, to breathe life into each tableau, the director, Claus Guth, is repeatedly condemned to appear, at the cost of scenes that trample, the story.
A young Dante animated by a very romantic exaltation is flanked by an avatar of middle age, accidented on the road in the middle of a dark forest and seeing, in a sort of experience of immediate death, the milestones of his existence pass by. The luxury of the double musical incarnation offered by the composer is well worth a slight loss of dramaturgical focus, because the Giovane Dante diffracts himself vocally in the transvestite role put in tension by the ambiguity that Christel Loetzsch cultivates with a mezzo-soprano with shades of tenor in the bass and countertenor in the treble. The composer assigns to the mature Dante a bel canto lyricism that the baritone Jean-Sébastien Bou assumes with a clear and warm timbre.
A very attentive Kent Nagano
Beatrice (Jennifer France) and Lucia (Maria Carla Pino Cury), whose halo reminds us of their status as saints, sometimes tend to survey neighboring acoustic lands, even if the coloratura soprano of the second reaches an altitude that is not in dispute with her. the first one. While the bass baritone Evan Hugues ties the wise Virgile to a solid bass, Dominique Visse opens, as for him, as an actor, a long parenthesis funny. Its scratchy falsetto carries with undeniable comic effect the Voice of the damned, but the jurisdiction of the latter extending from limbo to the last circle of hell, it takes a long time to endure the process.
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