C
ry out, cry out with terror, howl like a hurricane, moan like the deepest forest, let rocks crash down and torrents roar, cry out with fear because in this instant you see black horses racing through the skies, bells fall silent, the sun is obscured, dogs are baying, the devil has taken over the world, skeletons have come out of their tombs to hail the passing of the inky steeds of damnation. It’s raining blood from the heavens! The horses are as swift as thought, as unexpected as death, they are the beast that has pursued us forever, since the cradle, the ghost that knocks at our door at night, the invisible creature that scratches at our windowpane; cry out, all of you—as if your life depended on those cries!—HELP; pray to the Virgin Mary for mercy, you know in your hearts that she can’t save you, that no one can save you, you are damned, the beast is pursuing us, it’s raining blood, the wings of nocturnal birds are beating in our faces, Mephistopheles has poisoned the world, and you’re singing as if you were in the chorus of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta!
Think what you’re doing! You are singing Berlioz’s
Faust,
not to please, not to impress, not even to stir emotions; you’re singing to spread fear, you are a chorus of birds of bad omen, you bring a warning, you come to take our nests from us, you come to peck out our eyes and eat our tongues, then you answer, with the last hope of fear, you cry,
Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis,
this nest is ours, and if anyone comes near we will peck out his eyes and we will eat his tongue and we will cut off his balls and we will suck the gray matter from his skull and we will draw and quarter him and feed his guts to the hyenas and his heart to the lions and his lungs to the crows and his kidneys to the boar and his anus to the rats—cry out!—cry out your terror, but stand your ground, defend yourselves, there is more than one devil, that’s his deception, he poses as Mephisto but the devil is multiple, the devil is a merciless
we,
a hydra that knows no pity and no limit, the devil is like the universe, Lucifer has no beginning and no end, learn this, comprehend the incomprehensible, Lucifer is the infinite fallen to earth, he is heaven’s exile rockbound in the immensity of space, that was his divine punishment,
You shall be infinite and immortal on this mortal and finite earth,
but you, this night, here on this stage in Covent Garden, sing as if you were the allies of God abandoned by God, cry out as if you wished to hear God cry out because his favorite ephebe, his angel of light, betrayed him, and God, caught between laughter and tears—the Bible! what melodrama!—gave the world to the devil so that on this finite rock he could play out the tragedy of exiled infinitude: sing as God’s and the devil’s witnesses,
Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis, ora pro nobis, cry has, has, Mephisto,
drive out the devil,
Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis,
horn, sing out … bells, peal … assert yourselves, brass, the mortal multitude is approaching, you, chorus, you too are a multitude, a legion to drown out the clamor of
the bombs with your voices, tonight in London we are rehearsing during a blackout, and the Luftwaffe bombing is relentless, wave after wave of black birds sweep by streaming blood, endless troops of the devil’s steeds are racing through the black skies, the wings of the evil one are beating in our faces,
feel
him, that’s what I want to hear, a chorus of voices that will silence the bombs, no more, no less, Berlioz deserves that, don’t forget that I am French—
allez vous faire niquer!
—sing until the bombs of Satan are silenced, I will not rest until I hear that—do you understand?—as long as the bombs outside drown out the voices inside, we will stay here,
allez vous faire foutre, mesdames et messieurs,
until we drop with exhaustion, until the fatal bomb falls on our concert hall and, worse than fucked, we are ground into the ground, until you and I together rout the cacophony of the war with the dissonant harmony of Berlioz, the artist who doesn’t want to win a war, only drag us down to hell with Faust, because we, you and you and you and I as well, have sold our collective soul to the devil; sing like wild animals seeing yourselves for the first time in a mirror and not knowing you are you, howl like the specter that doesn’t recognize itself, like the hostile reflection, wail as if you discovered that your image in the mirror of my music is that of the most ferocious enemy, not the Antichrist, but the anti-you, the anti-father and anti-mother, the anti-child and the anti-lover, the creature with shit and pus under its fingernails that wants to stick its fingers up our assholes and in our mouths and in our ears and eyes, that wants to split open our spinal cords and infect our brains and devour our dreams: cry out like animals lost in the forest, beasts that must howl so that other beasts can recognize them from a distance, shriek like the birds to terrorize the aggressor that wants to take our nest from us … !
“Regard the monster you had never imagined, not a monster but a brother, a member of your family, who one night opens the door, rapes us, murders us, and burns down the house we all share …”
Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara wanted, at that point in the night rehearsal of
The Damnation of Faust
by Hector Berlioz, that December 28, 1940, in London, to close his eyes and know again the overwhelming yet serene sensation of work that is exhausting but finally accomplished; he wanted the music to flow independently to the ears of the public, even though everything in this ensemble depends on the authoritarian power of the conductor: the power of obedience. One gesture to impose authority. One hand, readying the percussion to announce the arrival at hell, the cello to lower its tone to the murmur of love, the violin to signal a tremolo of coming terror and the horn a dissonant caesura …
He wanted to close his eyes and feel the music flowing like a great river carrying him far away, away from the specific circumstance of this concert hall on a night during the London blitz, with German bombs raining down all around, and the orchestra and chorus of Monsieur Berlioz conquering Field Marshal Goring and assaulting the Führer himself with the terrible beauty of horror, saying to him, Your horror is true horror, it lacks grandeur, it’s niggardly horror, because you don’t understand, you will never be capable of understanding, that immortality, life, death, and sin are mirrors of our universal, internal soul, not your transitory and cruel external power … Faust places an unfamiliar mask on the man who doesn’t recognize it but ends up adopting it. That is his triumph. Faust enters the devil’s territory as if returning to the past, to lost myth, to the land of original terror—man’s work, not God’s or the devil’s, Faust conquers Mephisto because Faust is exiled, expelled, expulsed, master of
terrestrial terror, terrorized, interred, and disinterred: the human terrain on which Faust, despite his vicious defeat, forever reads himself …
The maestro wanted to close his eyes and think what he was thinking, wanted to say all these things to himself in order to be one with Berlioz, with the orchestra, with the chorus, with the collective music of this great and incomparable hymn to the demonic power of the human being when that human discovers that the devil is not a unique incarnation—
has,
has,
Mephisto
—but a collective hydra—
hup, hup, hup.
Atlan-Ferrara wanted, moreover, to renounce, or at least believe he was renouncing, the authoritarian power that inevitably made him, the young and already eminent European conductor “Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara,” the dictator of a collective ensemble untouched by the vanity or pride that could stigmatize the director, free of Lucifer’s sin. Inside the theater, Atlan-Ferrara was a minor god who renounced his powers on the altar of an art that was not his, not his alone but first of all the work of a creator named Hector Berlioz—though only he could conduct, he, Atlan-Ferrara, conduit, conductor, interpreter of Berlioz, and in any case authority over the interpreters subject to his power. Chorus, soloists, orchestra.
His limit was the public. The artist was at the mercy of the audience. Ignorant, vulgar, distracted or perceptive, intransigent connoisseur or simple traditionalist, intelligent but closed to the new, like the public that wouldn’t accept Beethoven’s Second Symphony, damned by a renowned Viennese critic of the time as “a vulgar monster that furiously slashes its uplifted tail until the desperately awaited finale is reached …” And hadn’t another celebrated critic, this one French, written in
La Revue des deux mondes
that Berlioz’s
Faust
was a work of “disfigurement, vulgarity, and bizarre sounds emitted by a composer incapable
of writing for the human voice”? With good reason, sighed Atlan-Ferrara, there were no monuments anywhere in the world to the memory of a literary or music critic.
Situated in the precarious equilibrium between two creations—the composer’s and the conductor‘s—Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara wanted to be borne away by the dissonant beauty of the seductive and yet frightening hell of Hector Berlioz’s oratorio. The secret to preserving that equilibrium—and consequently the spiritual peace of the
chef d’orchestre
—is that no one person should stand out. Especially in
The Damnation of Faust,
the voice must be collective in order to inspire the unavoidable fall and damnation of the hero.
But this night during the London blitz, what was it that prevented Atlan-Ferrara from closing his eyes and lifting his arms to direct Berlioz’s at once classic and romantic, cultivated and savage cadences?
It was that woman.
That singer who rose above the chorus kneeling before a cross—
Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis; Sancta Magdalena, ora pro nobis
—yes, kneeling like all the other women and yet imperious, majestic, distinct, separated from the chorus by a voice as black as her lidless eyes and as electric as the flaming hair curling like an ocean surf of enervating, magnetic distraction, bursting the unity of the ensemble, as above the sun-orange aureole of her hair and below the nocturnal velvet of her voice she was heard as something apart, something singular, something disturbing that endangered the equilibrium-from-chaos so carefully fashioned by Atlan-Ferrara this night when the bombs of the Luftwaffe were reducing central London to ashes.
He interrupted the rehearsal with a furious, unaccustomed gesture, pounding his right fist into his left hand. A blow so loud
that it silenced everything except a passionate voice, not insolent yet insistent, a singer at center stage, standing out yet kneeling before the altar of the Sancta Maria.
Ora pro nobis,
the woman’s high, crystalline voice filling the space of the stage, the singer possessed or empowered by the very gesture attempting to silence her, the conductor’s pounded fist. Tall, vibrant, mother-of-pearl skin, red hair, and dark gaze, the singer disobeyed—disobeyed him and disobeyed the composer, for Berlioz himself would not have tolerated a solitary, narcissistic voice rising above the chorus.
The furious bombardment outside imposed silence—the firebombing that since summer had kept the city in flames, a phoenix reborn again and again from its ashes—although this was neither an accident nor an act of local terrorism but aggression from without, a rain of fire that thundered hell for leather through the skies, recalling the final part of
Faust
; everything gave the impression that the hurricane of the skies was erupting like a rumbling earthquake, up from the entrails of the city, that the thunder was the fault of the earth not the sky …
It was the silence broken by the rain of bombs that inflamed Atlan-Ferrara, who unconsciously attributed his rage not to what was happening outside, or to its relation to what was happening inside, but to the rupture of his exquisite musical equilibrium—imposing balance on chaos—by that high and profound, isolated and proud voice “black” as velvet and “red” as fire affirming itself by rising above the women’s chorus, solitary as the presumed protagonist of a work that wasn’t hers, not because it belonged solely to Berlioz or to the director, the orchestra, the soloists, or the chorus, but because it belonged to everyone, and yet the woman’s voice, sweetly obstructive, proclaimed, “This music is mine.”
“This isn’t Puccini, and you’re not Tosca, Mam’selle Whatever-Your-Name-Is!” the maestro shouted. “Who do you think you are? Am I some cretin who can’t express himself clearly? Or are you some mental case who can’t understand me?
Tonnerre de Dieu!”
The concert hall was his territory, he knew, and the success of the performance depended on the tension between the director’s energy and will and the obedience and discipline of the ensemble under his command. The woman with the electric hair and velvet voice was challenging his authority. The woman was enamored of her own voice, she caressed it, took pleasure in it, and she was conducting it herself: the woman was doing with her voice what the conductor did with the ensemble—dominating it. She defied the conductor. She was saying to him, with her insufferable arrogance, Once you’re out of this building, who are you? Who are you when you step down from the podium? And deep inside he was silently asking her, How dare you, from your place in the chorus, display your solitary voice and your beautiful face like that? Why do you show such lack of respect? Who are you?
Maestro Atlan-Ferrara closed his eyes. He was overcome by an uncontrollable desire, a natural, even savage impulse to rebuff and scorn this woman who was interrupting the perfect fusion of music and ritual so essential to Berlioz’s dramatic legend. But at the same time he was fascinated by the voice he heard. He closed his eyes, believing that he was being seduced to enter the marvelous trance spun by the music, while in truth he wanted to isolate the voice of this rebellious, unthinking woman—though he didn’t know that yet. Nor did he know if, feeling these things, what he wanted was to make the woman’s voice his, to appropriate it.