Dido and Aeneas

F. Nicolas

Programme Notes

(Translation: Matthew Lorenzon)

Libretto

The work explores a single moment in the mythic love between Dido and Aeneas: that of their separation, where Aeneas furtively leaves Carthage to return to his quest to find a site to refound Troy.

The piece concentrates on the scene made by Dido in front of her lover preparing his flight. She produces a confrontation between a woman displaying love in the central foyer of existence and a young man inquiring into a justice that he knows he should re-establish somewhere without knowing in what exactly it consists.

Between feminine love and masculine justice, there is no synthesis here but the hard truth of a disjunction. The first word of the libretto is “Listen,” the last is “separation” : in sum, the point is to hear the “dismemberment” between Dido and Aeneas, but equally between the lingual heterophony of the voices (simultaneously mobilising three different languages) and the musical heterophony of the instruments.

Voices

Three voices? Three roles, three languages, three tempi, three manners of prosody and rhythm in language, three modes of vocalisation. In total, three musical dialectics.

- Dido speaks Latin. Her text is freely borrowed from Virgil (fourth book of the Aeneid) and prosodised without taking account of the original poetic metre (dactylic hexameter). Dido essentially resorts to speech-song (Sprechgesang) and its rhythm is founded on the distinction, proper to the Latin language, of short and long syllables. Her tempo is that of a crotchet = 120. Through her speech-song, Dido camps at the frontier of the musical and the lingual.

- Aeneas speaks English, singing this language from one end of the work to the other. His rhythm is founded on the accentuation proper to English (the syllables agglomerating around a specific point of stress of a word or a syntagm). His tempo is that of a crotchet = 100. Aeneas, through song, is incorporated into music, but, through his own tempo, at an interior distance.

- Finally, the chorus speaks French like a reciter. Its rhythm is fluid. Conforming to the prosody of French, the phrase is delivered with one trait, the syllabication playing on weak differences of durations and accents. Its tempo is that of a crotchet = 80. The chorus is held at an internal distance from the music, which agrees with its commentative purpose.

In a brief moment, Dido and Aeneas find each other around the French language to recall their amorous embrace. The chorus makes brief incursions as much into the Latin of Dido as into the English of Aeneas. In total, the three voices are superposed one on another (according to three different tempi) rather than forming a dialogue. They compose in this way a weave (rather than a counterpoint) that, even though musically notated, remains in essence lingual.

Instruments

The two sections (piano and percussion) alternate musical roles in a series of juxtaposed blocks rather than in continuous development throughout the work. The musical logic of the ensemble arises from a sort of musical “montage,” composing a kaleidoscope of propositions that the three voices come to traverse, form wakes in, and turn upside down. In total, the instrumental heterophony becomes progressively denser throughout the work, passing from well spaced-out to frenzied propositions.

Choral Study

Overall, the work is composite. It deploys itself according to two simultaneous faces, the one musical, the other lingual. In doing this, it neither “sets a text to music” (in assimilating it into music, as in lieder or opera) nor does it “musically accompany” a text (by supporting the text or acting as décor, as in melodrama) but interweaves two heterogeneous faces coexisting in a relatively autonomous manner. In other words: a heterophony between two types of heterophony: one lingual, the other musical.

This work is in this way the study (in the musical sense of the term) of rapports of a new type between an instrumental music and a speaking choir that we could call “Babelian.”

In doing this, is this a story of love between a text and a music, a story of justice between them (does the music try to do justice to a text?), of a separation between its two possible rapports? At the very least, it is a choral study, an experiment with a rapport between words and music that makes the rapport between love and justice resonate, separating “Dido and Aeneas.”