The Liceu revalidated last night with the Parra-Bieito-Pasolini triad its desire to establish itself as an artistic center that avoids being a museum of titles from the past and works to strengthen the future of the operatic genre. The premiere in Barcelona – after seeing the light in Bilbao – of this lyrical version of Orgia, which the Barcelona composer Hèctor Parra had been dreaming of for years, shook the consciences of a sensitive audience that on very rare occasions chose to leave the room.
And it was not precisely because of the boredom that a contemporary score can sometimes create, work that in this case reflected Parra's resounding compositional maturity. No, what pushed them to get up and leave the theater was, for some people, the unbearable, indecipherable and inexpressible mirror of their own (in)existence. That inability to transcend the rational idea of ourselves that Pasolini so miraculously pointed out in this play through the sadomasochistic relationship of a married couple of the decadent bourgeoisie. And, as usually happens with good operas, it was the music that was responsible for making the reality of the human being penetrate through the cracks of the subconscious. Music and that acting that personifies couple cannibalism to the point of catharsis: an authentic psychoanalysis without anesthesia.
Parra posed a legitimate question regarding this opera: if for Pier Paolo Pasolini, the renaissance of theater involved valuing the word and considering the actor an issuer of ideas aware of his role as a witness to the society in which he lives. ...and if Pasolin's theater is essentially of the spoken word... why make his Orgia an opera?
While the Simfònica del Liceu let flow in the hands of maestro Pierre Bleuse (of the Ensemble Intercontemporain) that protean lyricism of Parra's melodies that opportunely became a spoken voice to accentuate the brutal character of the action, Bieito invoked sadism and pointed out the origins of that self-destructive impulse.
The Donna played by Ausriné Stundyté is impressive. The Lithuanian soprano remembers the seduction she experienced as a child by her father... the smell of tobacco and expensive soap, the smell of semen that marked her sexual awakening... and Bieito makes her gut a cushion blinded by memory.
“The desire to rape us again will return,” he alleges. And he, the German baritone Christian Miedl, reproaches her that her very human passivity leads to her indignity. "Our words are sounds that say nothing," she laments. "Our reality is not what our words hide but what we express through ourselves using our bodies as figures." And also: “we do not have the strength to live our reality.”
For this couple of professors with a reputation, society is nothing more than a prison inside which they have discovered a new freedom. They enjoy the mere act of naming what they will do to each other. A distorted eroticism that must free them from their captivity, that must violate their past.
Why put music and action to the denunciation of the survival mechanisms of fascism in modern society, that system of obedience and submission that Pasolini exposed in Salò or the 120 days of Sodom and that here takes the form of a sadomasochistic rite that channels frustration and pain?
“Precisely because through an exploration of the limits of the sung voice, where almost opposite forms of vocality coexist – the composer himself responded –, we can get closer to the Pasolinian ideal and thus return to language its expressive capacity through a word that passes through the physiology of the body itself.
The enigma of the flesh, all that rationality of the word that hides an unbearable alienation from reality, can only be expressed when the physical act is truly allowed to speak. And with that in mind, Parra incorporates that unbearable friction into the vocal writing. And he finds ways, like when he lets a granular or semi-spoken voice coexist with a lyricism that invites a vibration of full power.
Too bad Calixto Bieito was absent, busy with another opera in Dresden, and I can't come out to say hello during the almost five minutes of final applause. The room, at 70%, after 150 tickets from subscribers, who make use of the Liceu's flexibility, have been returned.
