Paris, Sunday, November 15, 2025
Dear reader,
What a magnificent opera I attended this evening! Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, superbly Baroque! Ah! The first time I lent an ear to Handel’s Water Music! Never since had I recaptured the same sensation, the same feeling—only partially, when I listened to it again many years later. Well, yes, his Alla Hornpipe—water and light springing forth in unison, propelled by blood as polished as it is self-assured!—had doubtless returned me to that brief, rapt state of the past; but… the impressions of youth are always so powerful… In any case, this evening, then—as I was saying at the start of my text—this performance allowed me to rediscover more or less the same transport! When it strikes the soul in just the right place, there can be no mistake! So, obviously, first of all: what music!—far too brief an encomium.
But that was not all, my good sir: staging and costumes blended the taste of the period with our own age, with stylistic effects in a magical-futurist vein—an arc melting the past into a dreamlike future—a decorative language that gives a sense of spareness, bringing the supporting lines to the fore rather than all the work of makeup, drapery, and prettiness surrounding them—elements that in fact contribute greatly to the desired effect; therein lies all the subtlety. In that previous description I was thinking chiefly of the costumes, but the same was actually true of the sets. The effect of the sea’s swell, for example, was created by sheets crossing the stage, stretched at right angles along the floor at three levels of depth, in a white that seemed only very slightly opaque, powerfully illuminated in all the requisite marine hues—with the obligatory subtle shades of turquoise, of course—and sparkling effects. And so, when the curtain opened on Dido walking barefoot and dazed along that enchanted shore, I believed myself there, upon that mythical, dreamed-of Earth.
And then Belinda—my favorite singer and character, apart from the Sorceress—quick and alert intelligence embodied, loyal to her mistress and certain of what fortifies nobility: light, healthy pride, love, and, as the mere by-product granted her by her vital radiance, governance. All this to draw her mistress out of the nausea of feeling—which certainly had its effect! What quicksand she plunged her audience’s mood into; I clung as best I could to Belinda’s ingenuity, tense and taut, so as not to sink into the bottomless pit of depressive natures!—though it should be noted that one must, in fact, know how to let oneself fall and decompose emotionally into the most formless magma there is, in order to realize that, terrifying though it may be, it is not fatal. This bears some relation to Buddhist renunciation and spiritual death—momentous experiences!
Speaking precisely of Belinda’s radiant first appearance: what joy, what pleasure to hear the chorus sing for the first time, what a feeling of potency, of life on the rise—one that will doubtless not leave Dorian Astor indifferent, author of L’Essentiel, a two-page text in the program of tremendous density, which carries us to the heart of the work’s genesis and far beyond: a historical and artistic contextualization that must have delighted many. But it was the chorus I originally meant to discuss: above all, what joy to see and hear my excellent and very congenial singing teacher perform onstage for the first time—especially in a passage such as “Fear no danger to ensue, The Hero loves as well as you”!
My memory of many other magnificent airs, golden, glowing red, or an unsettling purple, somewhat escapes me at present, but allow me to retrieve them for you with our contemporary technology! Ah, I certainly do not deny myself the use of that invasive technology, though I keep it severely in line! And yes, two of those airs do come back to me after all: the one expressing the cruelty of the Sorceress and her attendants—what a shock to see my singing teacher caught up in that air, what violence! One could sense, moreover, that for this particular piece her soul was somewhat disoriented; it did not suit her (however magnificently she sang and sings)!—and then the enthusiastic air of Aeneas’s crew—an unfortunately and symbolically corrupted crew—the archetypal song accompanying the labor of the people, collective whenever necessity demands it, and thus an instance of pride never misplaced: confident in its craft, never flinching, and above all joyful in its exertion! An idealized people, doubtless, but smoke that in my view rises from a very real fire. All the sense of nobility proper to the humanity of the political left, a nobility that Nietzsche, unlike Marx, had not seen—could not or would not see, given the task he had set himself.
But let us return to that infernal sorceress—or rather, that abyssal one!—aha! To have brought in Ursula from The Little Mermaid, hideous beyond measure—especially here!—her eyes bloodshot with black blood, tears just as black streaming down her cheeks—allowing us to imagine how the blackness of her soul seeped into and ultimately established its dominion over every one of her vital fluids—effective and successful! Yes, my imagination doubtless ran away with me in the previous sentence at the thought of the vile and ignoble Baron Harkonnen in Dune. And the constellation of symbols and allusions by no means ends there. Two whitish mermaids with sagging bellies and dripping makeup—kin to the dreadful Baron, no doubt—floating in all their spectral verticality through empty space; or rather, submerged beneath the waves, for yes, this second act doubtless takes place in the depths of the sea.
And then their Cupid! The young—too-good—son of the whiteface clown, and an acrobat! Half angel, half lunar Pierrot, neither noble nor commoner, the only immaculate soul in the work, our Little Prince from the stars, whom the artistic direction wastes no time in corrupting—never forget to shake up the audience a little: he will be the evil spirit who appears to Aeneas in the guise of Mercury! And what a triumph this evil spirit is! Perfect backlighting from an intense spotlight behind him plunges his entire face and the front of his body into the most disturbing darkness imaginable. Picture a being with the appearance of a man—or at least with a man’s luminous, sharply delineated contours, thus a very real figure, seemingly embodied—yet whose most distinctively human bodily features and whose soul—his face, his torso!—are steeped in darkness!
Oh, of course, I have doubtless played the iconoclast by failing to mention the woman who performs Dido: “majestic”, without question, as the program describes her; a kind of vocal perfection—not without soul, mind you, let us be clear, and that is an understatement—but… what can one say… each soul—mine, in this case—vibrates at a different frequency! As for Aeneas, a harsher but related comment: fine technique, a highly pleasing, warm roundness lending him great assurance, but far too much control; how our friend cages his soul! An Apollonian cage, of course—and a somewhat muffled, muted, stifled Apollonian quality at that; the cage’s walls were doubtless partially soundproofed: the famous equilibrium of our dangerous mustachioed friend, shattered! Argh, how did I fall into this dark and cruel pit of criticism?!—a novice, moreover, a nonspecialist, what insolence! Doubtless so as to convey the joy and pleasure all the better by contrast; at least, that is the hope contained within it, and which I hope my opening paragraphs express.
Good heavens! I was forgetting all the bewitched henchmen, the whole gang, the cruel sorceress’s pack: black quadrupeds, reptilian but with bluntly oval heads and red eyes, half reptile-toads, half hyenas—like those in The Lion King, yes, indeed—thoroughly repellent, twisting every limb almost to the point of dislocation, not without a certain grace, naturally—therein lies the whole magic of art—or at least not without conveying to the audience that earthly pleasure, animal in the noblest sense of the term, of bodily mobility and flexibility.
Finally, it would take at least another entire text to sing the praises of this opera’s musical airs, but that will be for another time. And so, to close with a dedication to my singing teacher: the warrior’s air about fearing Cupid’s arrow—that one, yes, suited her to perfection!!
Until next time, dear reader!
Your servant, Pablo