Michel Leiris | Operratics / 2001 [reading]

anybody’s opera

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michel Leiris Operratics (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2001)

 

French author Michel Leiris [1901-1990] was a central figure in French culture for much of his life. Early on, he became interested in poetry and jazz, and—through his introduction to numerous writers and artists—Max Jacob, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Desnos, Georges Bataille, and, Leiris’ so-called “mentor,” André Masson among them—became involved early on in the Surrealist movement, writing for its magazines and publishing several Surrealist-based works including the fiction Aurora (1927-1928). In 1926 he married Louise Gordon, Picasso’s art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnwiler’s, stepdaughter.

     Three years later Leiris had a falling-out with surrealist leader André Breton, contributing to several anti-surrealist publications before involving himself with essays on art and creating ethnographical and sociological works, including the seminal study L’Afrique fantôme, a work that argued, along with Claude Lévi-Strauss, for an anthropological perspective for such studies. Leiris later became known for his insightful autobiographical works such as L’Age d’homme (Manhood) of 1939.

    As the publisher of Sun & Moon Press and, later, Green Integer, I had read and known of several of Leiris’ writings, but was quite surprised when my then-typographer and brilliant translator Guy Bennett brought me in 1998 his English-language version of one of Leiris’ major unpublished works, Operatiques, a quirky collection of short pieces Leiris had penned on his secret love, opera. As Leiris declared in his outline to this small, but densely-written work, he perceived his “impertinent” and even “naïve” collection of “fragments” on opera as an attempt to bring his views of the genre to the reader as neither a musician nor a man of the theater, but “as a writer who deals” openly with “aesthetic issues,” combining the concept of “opera” with the “erratic,” as in something deviating from the conventional or customary course, a kind of “wandering” through his beloved subject.

     Myself a lover of opera, with only a rudimentary knowledge of music (I sang throughout college in chorale groups and in musical theater), Leiris’ Operratics, as we came to title it in English, was a perfect book for a press, Green Integer, that had declared itself open to publishing works of “pataphysics and pedantry,” belles-lettres, in particular, that combined erudition with exploratory writing. Leiris suggests his own approach to the subject quite coherently in his short comparison of “Nietzsche and Wagner,” wherein he describes Nietzsche as an “aphorist,” and therefore a more modern thinker, as opposed to the “grandiose, fluid lyricism” of Wagner, which helped to make him a Romantic interested in the effacement of structure.

    Leiris himself is a kind of aphorist in these opera pieces, which consist of a combination of precise ideas, categorizations, observations, and what he has described elsewhere as “brisées,” metaphorically speaking, “broken branches,” the remnants or perhaps buds of new thought—as opposed to essays or structured critical commentary.

     In such works there is a strong implication, helped by his own demurral and the very brevity of the pieces, these works might have been penned by anyone, at least by any intelligent, occasional operagoer. In truth, of course, Leiris’ comments are extremely well-informed. Who else amongst us might suggest, as he does in his short piece, “Die Zauberflöte,” the relationship of Mozart’s characters to Eastern antiquity and speak of the libretto’s “racial hierarchies?” or describe Monteverdi (as in “Discovery of Monteverdi”) as having “expressionistic” qualities that reached its zenith in Puccini?

     Yet it is the appearance of his sleight-of-hand observations that make his works seem so unpretentious, linking them more to a popular guide of literary and historically-linked ideas  about opera than to the erudite operatic commentaries of opera critics and musicologists. While grounding his aphoristic commentaries in philosophically-based perceptions, Leiris, nonetheless, makes it all seem easy, encouraging any intelligent operagoer to feel that he or she might gather his or her comments about the subject.

     That seems important, somehow, within the context of today’s HD-live Met broadcasts and the seeming increasing popularity of opera in general: in just the past few months I have attended not only several of the Met broadcasts and LA Opera productions, but recently saw a small new Los Angeles-based company, the Pacific Opera Project, perform a delightful rendition of Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti in a theater space in a Santa Monica public park; heard a network news report of the recent “hyperopera” production of a new work, “Crescent City” in a rented art space in Atwater Crossing (near Los Angeles) where attendees had their choice of sitting on regular chairs, hunkering down on beanbags, or standing and wandering about; watched a YouTube recording of Mayo Thompson’s opera Victorine performed (with Felix Bernstein and Gabe Rubin) in the Whitney Museum of Art Biennial in New York; and happened upon a free New York Symphony Hall production of Ned Rorem’s Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters with text by Gertrude Stein.

     Had Leiris lived to have partaken of these new opera-going opportunities, I am certain he would have embraced the transformative changes they represent. What once was the domain primarily of devotees, claques, and wealthy patrons has opened up opera to everyday theater and filmgoers who rush to and gush over these new experiences. I know hundreds of purists might wish me into the lower depths of the Rhine, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if there we were to discover a new ring—of blogs by Leiris-inspired, amateur operagoers, twittering away about their newest encounters? 

 

Los Angeles, May 13, 2012

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (May 2012).