Anybody who has ever heard or seen it cannot but be, at least initially, overwhelmed by the sheer breadth of Olivier Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise. “Six transcendent hours,” declared the headline in El País upon the Spanish premiere of the composer’s only opera. Even gazing upon the eight volumes of full score—themselves dazzling exemplars of the engraver’s art, which intimate at the bejeweled sonorities codified therein—totaling some 30 lbs. are enough to convey the awe-inspiring grandiosity of a work which the composer had intended as the culmination of his artistic life, the most fervent declaration of his religious belief. With the mass of resources, not to mention the stamina required on the part of performers and audience, this monument of 20th century musical creativity is difficult to mount as it is in the best of times. But in the midst of a global pandemic of epochal proportions?
Theater Basel in Switzerland last year was faced with a dire dilemma. Cancel their forthcoming run of Saint François d’Assise, which had been scheduled far before COVID-19 up-ended normality across the globe, and scrap the massive investment, artistically and financially, they had already made? Or did these extraordinary times require an extraordinary solution?
In steps Oscar Strasnoy, a French-Argentine composer who was a product of the Paris Conservatory, the institution where Messiaen himself had graduated from and later became one of its most respected professors. The task was unenviable, seemingly impossible: to trim the instrumentation of Saint François d’Assise without eliminating a single strand of Messiaen’s web of counterpoint. In other words, to bring as close as possible the sonority of the original while making do with only about a third of its resources.
Last October, Benedikt von Peter, Artistic Director of Theater Basel, charged ahead against the odds, staging Saint François d’Assise in Strasnoy’s daring yet faithful new guise. The production was as much a testament to the ingenuity of artists confronted with difficult choices, as it was to the power of Messiaen’s music, which emerged, according to reviews, unscathed. “As a result of this reduction,” one critic wrote, “the musical structures, which remained intact, stood out more clearly and. . . often sound softer, more poetic than the original.”
A few days ago, Oscar Strasnoy kindly took the time to talk about this remarkable project, which he hopes may continue to serve Messiaen even long after that day, hopefully sooner rather than later, when we can leave the face masks and hand sanitizer behind once and for all.
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Néstor Castiglione: Had Messiaen’s music crossed your path previously in some meaningful way?
Oscar Strasnoy: Absolutely. I was in the [Paris Conservatory] from the early 1990s to 1998. So most of my teachers, I would say all of them, were Messiaen’s students. So even if I didn’t have any direct contact with him, his presence was everywhere. Everyone in the conservatory was connected with him. I had direct contact with his music in the class of Michaël Lévinas, who is a great composer and was teaching musical analysis at that time. That was my first deep, direct contact with Messiaen. Then I studied in Germany with Hans Zender, one of the best conductors of Messiaen all around, one of my most important teachers of music. He was very much keen on Messiaen’s music.
N. C.: Had you seen Saint François d’Assise before?
O. S.: I’ve never seen it live, but have seen parts on video. It’s such a massive opera. Very seldom done, as you know. Our production [with Theater Basel] was only its ninth production altogether in its 40 years of existence. Not very much at all, especially for a composer like Messiaen.
N. C.: Was this reduction of the work something that had been planned prior to the current global pandemic?
O. S.: No, this project was the direct result of the COVID-19 situation. Initially, Theater Basel’s goal was to perform Saint François d'Assise in its original form. Messiaen’s estate, a committee, would never allow my reorchestration in any other situation. But the pandemic presented a very peculiar situation for Theater Basel. They debated whether to cancel or to proceed, but with a reduced arrangement. Then it was a question of obtaining the rights to do this. The estate thought it over for about a month until they agreed to let us do this, but only for this exceptional occasion. However, I doubt that performing this arrangement will be possible in the future. I have to say, it’s such a huge opera, it’s quite impossible for most theatres to mount it under normal circumstances. As we were preparing Saint François d’Assise in Basel, already there were five other theatres expressing interest in performing this reduced version. So there is demand for this, but there are legal issues to consider. And I understand perfectly the zeal of Messiaen's heirs, whose primary function is to protect the integrity of his œuvre.
N. C.: What were some of the challenges you faced in making this reduction?
O. S.: The orchestra was a little less than 50 musicians altogether, about a third of the original; the choir was about a fifth. The singers on stage, of course, weren’t touched. What I did mainly was to thin out Messiaen’s orchestration. Apart from his use of percussion and some rarely used woodwinds, like the contrabass clarinet, for example, his orchestra is fairly traditional. Honestly, in some ways it’s very much like Richard Strauss. Nothing that unusual. There are so many lines which are scored for several instruments playing simultaneously. You look through every note in the score and you always find two to seven instruments playing the same thing. So what I had to do was to let in a little air, allow a continuation of the music. To turn this massive thing into a kind of chamber opera. Even so, there are still about 50 instrumentalists needed, which is more than one hears in Mozart. But still it sounds like chamber music. The textures of Saint François d’Assise aren’t actually that dense. One thinks that it is, however, because of the huge orchestra. I swore to the committee of heirs on Messiaen’s Bible that I would respect the musical material, that nothing insofar as the lines, the contrapuntal layering would be removed. Everything would remain. Just that I would make the instrumentation lighter. Which isn’t so simple, because sometimes you have 56 lines sounding simultaneously, and in this case not very many instruments to redistribute them to. What I used was three keyboards as a kind of glue, just to be sure I could include everything. Sometimes I’d use them to hide certain chords and to fill out the textures.
N. C.: Was Messiaen’s estate closely involved in the making of this reduction?
O. S.: They were not involved at all. That would’ve been impossible with our tight schedule anyway. Once they gave us their consent, we only had about three months to assemble all of this. It was almost an impossible job. Just in the amount of copying, for example. You have to know that the score is around 1,500 pages. A massive thing. Then you have 19,000 single pages for the musicians’ parts. Just to copy it was an unbelievable amount of work for my assistants. I had five assistants helping me to copy the music.
N. C.: Did this commission originate from the Messiaen estate?
O. S.: Actually, the commission came from Theater Basel. I’d done a number of things in Switzerland and they had come to know me. They asked me, first of all, if I thought such a chamber arrangement would be possible. I really had to think about it carefully. My first thought was that it would be impossible given the short timeframe. But then I considered that for me as a composer, it would be the only opportunity I would have to look at this score in such an intimate, detailed way, as if from the inside. Even as a conductor I’ve never been able to see a score in this precise and minute way. It was fantastic to study and live with this score, which is such an incredible achievement.
N. C.: Was it difficult for you to put aside your own compositional prerogatives and subsume yourself into the work of another artist?
O. S.: No. This had nothing to do with composing. I never assumed anything like an artistic view on this. This could’ve been done by any person who had the technical knowledge. You don’t have to be a composer to do that. I never put myself into this. It was just like a technical adventure, a kind of service, not an artistic work, in a way. Especially because it was never approached in the manner that Zender, for example, would reinterpret or rewrite music by Schubert or Schumann. This was just a reorchestration which strived to sound as close to the original as possible. But in some respects this is even more challenging: to create the illusion of sounding like the original with so much fewer musicians.
N. C.: Were the performers supportive?
O. S.: They were very positive and supportive. Above all Clemens Heil, a fantastic conductor and an unbelievably patient person, very important traits when realizing a work like this. He advocated for me constantly. The singers were totally convinced too, very important. The instrumentalists were coping with very rudimentary material, because the parts were often copy and pasted from the original, sometimes in a rough way because of the tight schedule. My assistants were overwhelmed. The orchestra musicians were very patient, but sometimes practically collapsing from my additional difficulties in Messiaen’s already technically challenging score. Theirs was a doubly difficult task because the instrumentalists had to take on additional lines from instruments which had been omitted. I had to redistribute these parts to whoever could take a breath and pick them up.
N. C.: Do you think your version could stand up as a viable alternative in a post-COVID world?
O. S.: Look, I think this version works. In a different way from the original, of course. The piece is transformed into a kind of chamber opera. Almost Mozartian. Which for me works much better with this libretto. As you know, it’s about a saint who was a hermit. On stage there are only eight characters, but really the opera focuses on only two: Saint Francis and the Angel. So it’s a very intimate story. This reorchestration basically fits that, I believe, much better. Of course, you miss some of the greatest moments of the work. You cannot replace a 150-piece orchestra. There’s no other way of getting that sonority. But, on the other hand, you have clarity here you couldn’t get otherwise. That said, I think if this were allowed and it would be established as an alternative to the original, I’d like to have at least a year to correct and improve some minor details. But when this work is done, I’m convinced it could be a good alternative that would be convincing and viable for smaller theatres.
N. C.: Put another way, the original is like a universal, cosmic vision of God; yours is like a personal revelation.
O. S.: If you’d like. I mean, I don’t think you need such a huge apparatus to commune with God, as it were. In our days one can have contact with God, if you want, just being alone on stage. I have a feeling that Messiaen was granted this opportunity and just channeled all his resources and knowledge into it. He wanted to be huge, Wagnerian. But that doesn’t necessarily have to do with the subject or even our world. For the sake of the piece’s survival, it would be important to have this more realistic version, with its economy of resources. Something which is more connected to our present.
N. C.: Will there be any further performances of your version?
O. S.: I don’t think it will be performed again. For one thing, even this smaller version, just for the role of Saint François, it requires a lot of time. I felt sorry for the singer who sang the role, Nathan Berg, a fantastic baritone from Canada. He worked on this role for almost a year, there were only a few performances, and the theatre was forced to drastically reduce the audience capacity [due to Swiss social distancing regulations]. It’s one of the few operas where you have the protagonist in almost every moment on the stage. There’s not even an instant to have water backstage. A huge investment of energy, time, and study. You know, it was done a few times in Basel and that’s it. It’s unclear whether they’ll do it again.
N. C.: So I suppose there is no published version of your score?
O. S.: It isn’t published, no. Not at the moment. Oddly enough, Messiaen’s publisher, Éditions Alphonse Leduc, is in the same publishing group, Wise Music, as my first publisher. I know them very well. They’re all very nice people. They want, of course, the work to be performed in as many theatres as possible. They would like to publish my version, so long as the committee of Messiaen’s estate would permit it.