Control químico

The libretto evoked much criticism from newspaper critics and singers. In his review in the Cape Times of 3 November, Deon Irish’s criticism was directed toward the one-

dimensional portrayal of the European characters pitted against the more sympathetic depiction of the African roles, accentuating the underlying moralizing tendency of the libretto. This also struck the present writer during the rehearsals; the European characters were almost projected as caricatures, not only through the text they sing, but also in the way they were asked to act and pronounce their words. After interviewing the director Geoffrey Hyland, I realised that Hyland over-accentuated these latent characteristics of the European characters in order to achieve more contrast between the African and European characters.

Huyssen later explained that this was an unhappy result of circumstances as his intentions were rather the opposite. 92 Here again the fragmented, incomplete, almost hacked-apart character of the libretto proved disadvantageous to the overall message of the opera. As a result of the cutting of the entire middle section of the libretto, the development of the characters was severely curtailed. The composer was furthermore of the opinion that the singer who sang the role of the curator, Arthur Swan, did not have the artistic capacity to infuse the character with life and compassion. These sentiments were echoed by Barry Smith:

Both libretto (by the Bulgarian writer Ilija Trojanow) and music at times probably needed a touch of the blue pencil: the story is highly allegorical and convoluted ... obfuscated in highly prolix, often moralizing and philosophical terms and, frankly, often ludicrous language. ‘My days of bleak were gone in a streak when he pampered me for a full whole week.’ Enough said.93

The moralizing tendency of the libretto was picked up by more critics. Brent Meersman from the Mail & Guardian wrote:

The attempt to treat words (which have meaning) as the abstractions of musical sound is intellectually stimulating but emotionally – and I would therefore argue operatically – self- defeating. The bursts of straight recitative were a telling relief.

The libretto is the major problem. The story – and one cannot help but think of comparable failings with the Handspring Puppet Company’s Tall Horse here – also a museum theme, 92 _{Interview with the composer on 01 March 2006.}

roots in Malian culture, similar set – muddied in with an allegorical cosmological lecture – struggles to emerge and cannot hold our interest.94

The Sunday Independent published a review by J. Brooks Spector. He also found difficulty with the libretto, hinting at the lack of effective dramaticism picked up by Hyland:

However, the story line, as currently presented, has problematic elements. The conflict between the main protagonists, and thus in turn the conflict between the concept of masques as museum objects or authentic, embedded cultural engines, could be crisper. Thus adjusted, the audience would be drawn more closely to the raw edges of this conflict through the characters. The need for vivid conflict is important when the music, albeit interesting and subtle, operates within relatively narrow emotional bands.

This challenge actually confronts many recent works because contemporary composition style has relegated vocal roles from the centrality of their 18th and 19th century position to a circumstance where they have become just one more element in a greatly expanded orchestra. But the end of arias like Au Fond du Temple Saint, Nessum Dorma or Un bel Di means that the emotional cores of operatic characters become less accessible to audiences. As a result, something else must come forward to take up the slack so that the dramatic tensions in the story line are understandable and approachable.95

3.3 Conclusion

Brent Meersman’s Mail and Guardian-review concluded as follows:

Masque is still a fresh and unstable work, somewhat like a wet oil painting that has already been framed and hung in a gallery before it has set. The music itself is the strongest element and Huyssen has resplendently achieved his stated aims.96

Meersman’s use of the words ‘fresh’ and ‘unstable’ is striking. So is his connection of these words with a recently completed oil painting of which the paint is still wet, but which has been provided with a frame and exhibited for display in a gallery. Indeed, the

expectations surrounding a work like Masque are similar to those of a painting on display. Audiences visit opera theatres to see completed, framed, aesthetic visions in a museum of listening conditioned by the nineteenth century. In the case of Masque, however, the ‘freshness’ and ‘instability’ that Meersman detected after a first hearing are in this chapter exposed to be more than just analogous to the ‘unsettled’ quality of wet paint, which

94 _{Brent Meersman, ‘Masque, Theatre Pick of the Week’.}

95 _{O.J. Brooks Spector, ‘Defining local opera in a way that balances tradition with the unusual’.} 96 _{Brent Meersman, ‘Masque, Theatre Pick of the Week’.}

implies that formal issues in the work have been resolved. In this chapter the writer has argued that the formal issues have not been resolved in Masque. The libretto was cut and adjusted for the specific run of performances in Cape Town. This was not done for

aesthetic reasons alone, but ostensibly because of practical problems. Compromises had to be reached with regard to the composer’s ideals of voice production and of orchestral integration.

Listening to the official recording of Masque, it is also clear that much of what the composer wrote was left unperformed or was wrongly or badly performed. What was heard in the Artscape Theatre Complex on 28 October, 1, 3 & 5 November 2005 was not a complete work as yet unsettled in its formal conception, but, I would argue, an incomplete artistic vision in which the tensions playing out in the musical and dramatic material resulted in an incomplete, experimental and fractured structure. Taking our cue from Adorno, we could articulate this dynamic as follows:

Of the same origin as the social process and ever and again laced through by its traces, what seems to be strictly the motion of the material itself moves in the same direction as does real society even where neither knows anything of the other and where each combats the other. Therefore the composer’s struggle with the material is a struggle with society precisely to the extent that society has migrated into the work, and as such it is not pitted against the production as something purely external and heteronomous, as against a consumer or an opponent.97

Immediately following on from the passage on the ‘tendency of musical material’, Adorno uses the concept of ‘immanent reciprocation’.98 It is this process of tension and paradox and aesthetic yearning that characterizes Masque more than anything. Reading the score of the opera and taking the composer at his word leaves us short of an estimation of Masque’s meaning as a representative text of aesthetic indigenization. Both text and composer’s intent are bound to fall short to explain these ruptures, as both ideologically behold the idea of the opera.

It was only by studying the opera in rehearsal, in performance and in reception that the composer’s struggle was seen not only as a struggle with material, but clearly also a struggle with society and the expectations and abilities of South African society to come to grips with this particular vision of an ideal society. This change of focus between what is

97 _{Theodore Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, Frankfurt Am Main 1976, p. 32.} 98 _Ibid.

written in the score and what is heard, between what the composer intended and what people understood, between the dramatic fusion of opposites and the continued conceptual identification and separation of these opposites revealed Masque as an event or process that graphically illustrates aesthetic indigenization as a hugely problematic idea. The simpler, easier, more demonstrative the transformational gesture or rhetoric (such as quotation of black tunes, use of black rhythms or instruments), the more easily it is

understood, appreciated and endorsed by performers and audiences. At the same time, such easily understood gestures are by definition powerless to change established ideas. They are, to use another Adornian term, already ‘neutralized’. On the other hand, aesthetic attempts to represent the transformational space in more intellectually, musically

performative ways – and it is being suggested the Masque does just that – will inevitably and even characteristically disrupt and fail to live up to societal expectations.

Perhaps then aesthetic indigenization is not so much a problematic idea but an arena for the working out of problems on the level of material; problems that are not exclusively or even primarily musical problems, but social problems. This would imply that aesthetic indigenization is always only a process, and one ill-served by scholarly or artistic

demonstrations of successfully completed ‘works’ as instances of autonomous mirrors of society. When Muller writes that ‘what is certain, is that new South African works and productions thereof are rarely given the opportunity to be performed regularly to develop the nucleus of an indigenous repertoire. Whatever the reasons for this and notwithstanding the composer and the work: this is an impoverished cultural situation’,99 he misses the point. Huyssen’s Masque fails the test of a work that can be absorbed into the repertoire of the rarefied world of Cape Town Italianate opera. Because of this, it remains open and openly receptive to society and life. This could well be the ultimate condition for aesthetic indigenization in South African music to happen.