Words Without Music: A Memoir (53 page)

With
Orphée
, the music comes out of the scenes of the film, but for
La Belle et La Bête
I wanted to use some of the techniques found in traditional operas whereby a musical theme is linked to a person: when a character appears, their music is heard. This is the traditional operatic system of leitmotifs. There was a theme for Belle and a theme for La Bête. There was a theme for when they are together and another for when they’re traveling toward each other. As the opera progresses, those themes return. That was the chosen musical strategy of the film.

The leitmotif for La Bête starts low in the orchestra, and as it rises, turns into a melody. The theme associated with Belle occurs for the first time when she enters the chateau and walks through the hallway of candle-holding arms that have emerged from the walls. It is delicate music, but it’s constantly being interrupted by growls and other sounds being made by La Bête. Her music is also heard when La Bête enters her room to watch her sleeping. As the opera proceeds and La Belle begins to return his love, her music becomes intertwined with the music of La Bête. It is his music that becomes the love music of the opera.

In the scene when Belle begs La Bête for permission to visit her father, La Bête, moved by her plea, decides to let her go, but requires her, at the cost of his own life, to return in a week. He explains to her that his magic exists by the force of five power objects—the rose, the key, the mirror, the glove, and the horse. These five are the root of La Bête’s creativity and magic.

The point is, if a young artist were to ask Cocteau directly what he would need to pursue the life and work of an artist, these five elements would be the answer. The rose represents beauty. The key represents technique—literally, the means by which the “door” to creativity is opened. The horse represents strength and stamina. The mirror represents the path itself, without which the dream of the artist cannot be accomplished. The meaning of the glove eluded me for a long time, but finally, and unexpectedly, I understood that the glove represents nobility. By this symbol Cocteau asserts that the true nobility of mankind are the artist-magician creators. This scene, which leads directly to the resolution of the fairy tale, is framed as the most significant moment of the film and is the message we are meant to take away with us: Cocteau is teaching about creativity in terms of the power of the artist, which we now understand to be the power of transformation.

FOR COCTEAU, PLACE HAS A SPECIAL SIGNIFICANCE
related specifically to creativity. In the three operas, the place or site of creativity is a central idea. The site of creativity for
La Belle et la Bête
is the chateau. In
Orphée
, the site of creativity is the garage where Orphée’s car is parked and where he hears the communications from the other world. In the third part of the trilogy,
Les Enfants Terribles—
adapted for the screen by Cocteau from his 1929 novel of the same name but directed by Jean-Pierre Melville—the site of creativity is “the Room,” where almost everything in the film plays out.

For this third opera, which premiered in 1996, I chose a different approach to the resetting of the film. If
Orphée
was a romantic comedy and
La Belle
an allegorical romance, there is no doubt that
Les Enfants
is a grand tragedy, ending with the death of Paul and Elisabeth, the brother and sister who are the two principals. The film follows the lives of Paul and Elisabeth from when Paul is recovering from an injury and Elisabeth is nursing him back to health in their shared bedroom. It is here in the Room that they invent “the Game,” in which the winner is the one who has the last word, leaving the other frustrated and angry. After their invalid mother dies and they have become young adults, they move together into a mansion left to Elisabeth by her deceased husband, where they reconstruct the Room. The Game is now played much more seriously, involving two other young people, Agathe and Gerard. The love, jealousy, and deceit that develop between these two star-crossed couples lead at the end of the movie to the deaths of Elisabeth and Paul.

In my rethinking of this film as an opera, I sought to introduce dance into the mix. Dance was the only modality of theater that had not yet been addressed in the trilogy and was the one with which I had had the most direct working experience. I asked Susan Marshall, the American choreographer and dancer, to be both director and choreographer, and to bring her dance company into the production. Besides that I would need four singers for the two couples. The original score for the film was the Concerto for Four Harpsichords by Bach, and I decided to continue the main musical texture with a multikeyboard work by using three pianos as my music ensemble.

Susan and I spent months of preparation mapping out how the vocal quartet and her company of eight young men and women would, in music and dance, translate the film into a live performance work. In this way, at least we had a preliminary plan for the division of the work into scenes and an overall idea for the staging.

In
Les Enfants
the Room itself is where almost everything plays out. It is here that the Game is played which, transparently enough, becomes “the world as art”—here actually replacing the ordinary world completely. The voice-over in the film (which is the voice of Cocteau himself) makes it absolutely clear that we are to understand Elisabeth and Paul not as just twins, but really two sides of the same person. The total immersion in the Game has now led to something not unexpected but almost familiar: the obsession of the artist in this narrow context, shared, as it were, only between themselves, as a heightened form of narcissism.

Cocteau assures us that the ones who seek transformation put themselves at great risk when their energy is applied to themselves. In
Les Enfants Terribles
, though the artist must, and will, risk everything in the game of inner and outer transformation, this interaction with the ordinary world can be dangerous and decisive. The ultimate subject of Cocteau’s work is creativity. He was greatly concerned about being the one who transcends the ordinary world, about being immortal in his work. The bargain he struck was to give up the bourgeois life in order to live the life of an artist.

These alternative realities—the ordinary world and the world that the artist either is creating or creating from—result in the artist’s having his feet in two different worlds at the same time. In the case of poets, they are obliged to use the language of the quotidian world, the daily world. This is one of the curious things about poetry: the currency of poetry is the currency of everyday language. They are truly the alchemists who are turning lead into gold—and that is, above all, what makes poetry such a high art form.

Painters, dancers, musicians, composers, and sculptors, on the other hand, live in two worlds. In my case, one is the ordinary world and one is the world of music, and I’m actually in both at the same time. There are special languages we use in that other world—the language of music; the language of movement; the language of image—and they can exist independently. We live in these different worlds, though at times we may not even see the connections.

When a composer is asked “Is this the right note, or is it not the right note?” or if a painter or a dancer is asked “Did you mean that?” the artist will try to go back to the moment of creation to find out.

“If I can remember what I did,” he might say, “I can tell you the answer.”

The problem I have—one shared by almost everybody—is that in order to write that piece of music in the first place, or to write almost anything of quality that is both abstract and moving at the same time, the artist has to arrive at new strategies of seeing—or in my case, even to hear clearly what I think I have heard. It can be a very slippery business: “Am I hearing a triad? Am I hearing a tritone? Am I hearing a fifth?” To finally know what I’m actually hearing takes an extraordinary function of attention. In other words, the artist has to gather up his ordinary ability to see or hear, and he has to see better, farther, and more clearly than he ever did before. With this we are now moving out of the ordinary perception into the extraordinary perception that the artist has when he is writing. In order to do that, what we do routinely is to gather together our entire attention.

Weight lifters, the ones who lift the five-hundred-pound weights, sometimes stand in front of the barbell for thirty seconds, or a minute, or even a minute and a half. When they are finally in the right frame of mind, they execute the clean and jerk—they pick the barbell up and then throw it up above their heads. They are able to do this because of their passage from their usual ordinary attention to the extraordinary gathering of attention that is required to accomplish something that is unbelievable.

In order to do that, a sacrifice has to be made, as Cocteau, speaking through Death/the Princess, says in
Orphée
. In fact, something has to be given up. What is given up is the last thing left that we are holding on to: the function of attention we use when watching ourselves.

In the ordinary world, we see ourselves essentially all the time—walking down the street, looking at ourselves in the mirror, sitting in the subway and seeing the reflection of ourselves in the window. This function of seeing ourselves is a form of attention. It’s like the trapped miner who is trying to get out of the mine. He’ll do anything he can to break through. In the same way, in order to break through that moment of frustration—to grasp the abstract and bring it into our own mind—what we have left to sacrifice is that last aspect of attention, the ability to watch ourselves.

The reason I know this is that I often have a great deal of trouble remembering what I was thinking when I wrote a piece. What I do is to take all my sketches and number them, like an archivist, or almost like a scientist, so that I can look into my own past and find out what I was thinking.

Although these notes provide me with
evidence
of a thought, they don’t, however, provide me with the thought
itself
. Sometimes a player will say to me, “Is this an A or an A flat?” and I’ll say to him, “I don’t know.”

“How can you not know? You wrote it.”

Well, that’s the point. I wrote it, but I wasn’t there. The “I” that was watching wasn’t there. The witness of my life at that moment had been sacrificed. The witness had to go, because I needed every increment of attention that I could muster in order to visualize the music. I believe that what happens at that moment is that I’ve lost awareness of myself. That awareness is now part of the attention and with that attention I can continue the work.

“But what was it like when you wrote
Satyagraha
?” someone might ask.

“I don’t know.”

“But you were there, weren’t you?”

“Are you sure?”

Because I’m not sure that I am there at that moment. The ordinary witness has been lost—the artist Philip has robbed the daily Philip of his ability to see himself. That’s very clearly what happens when people say “I wrote it in a dream,” or “I don’t know where the music came from.” They’ll say all kinds of things: “It must have come from God,” or “It must have come from a past life,” or whatever. All they’re really saying is, “I don’t remember how I did it,” and they may make up an outside source. But the real source is not any of those things. It’s a process that the artist has learned. He has tricked himself into gaining that extra attention that he needed to do the work.

There was a teacher named Krishnamurti, born in India in 1895, whom I wasn’t particularly close to, but who had a number of ideas I liked. Krishnamurti, who lectured all over the world and authored many books, including
The First and Last Freedom
, before his death in 1986, always talked about the moment of the present being the moment of creativity. He tried to press on you that if you really understood that creativity was opening up to you at every single moment of time, the experience of that would be the real moment of awareness. I never really understood it very well, and yet I felt that it was a very powerful idea. What he was talking about, as far as I could tell, was a truly spontaneous experience of living. He wasn’t my teacher—I heard him speak once and I read some of his books—but what was interesting about what Krishnamurti said was that it was about a spontaneous unfolding of life. There was nothing routine about it, there was nothing repeated about it: it was continuously new.

When you have one foot in this world and one foot in the other world, the foot in the other world is the foot that takes you into the world of clarity and of power. The problem with recall is that when I return to the world of the witness, I’m not sure if I’m remembering correctly what I wrote, because I’m not using the same tools to remember as I used to write. The world of the witness is less powerful than the world of the writer, because the function of writing will eventually rob the witness of his energy so that the writer will be able to conceptualize the “art” work.

When I’m making a sketch, I’m hearing something, but I don’t know exactly what it is. A lot of writing is the effort made in trying to hear. The question for me always is “Is that what I’m hearing?” I’ve heard so much music in my life that it’s now easy for me to recall it. I can remember Beethoven’s Ninth, Bach’s and Vivaldi’s concertos—they’re all available to me. Outside of my memory, they’re written in books, they’re in recordings. I can hear them whenever I want to. But when composing, this new music doesn’t have the benefit of having had a prior existence of any kind at all. A particular piece has zero existence until the moment of its creation. Therefore, the question comes back to “Can I describe what I heard?”

I’ve had dreams where I dreamed music and saw it as having width, length, breadth, color: a visual object. Once I was having a dream about a piece of music, and I came to a modulation, and what I saw was a door on a hinge. It was a perfect image of modulation. You walked through a door and into another place—that’s what a modulation does. What I did in the dream was to create a shorthand to represent the modulation by seeing it visually. It offered me an alternative way of thinking of modulation—my idea of modulation was enhanced to some degree by this image of the hinge found in a dream.