JOSEF MYSLIVEČEK MAKES L’OLIMPIADE MELODRAMATIC
This topic, and its standard timeline and suspense architecture was used vastly on Italian opera stages in the 18th century. Josef Mysliveček is one composer, the latest then, who used the topic, subject, drama, and suspenseful crime story to entertain the vast opera audience in Italy at the time from Naples to Venice and many other cities. The story was used by Vivaldi (1734) and Pergolesi (1735) on a libretto by Pietro Metastasio (1733) before Mysliveček The first composer to deal with the libretto was Antonio Caldara in a production in Vienna, Austria in 1733.
The topic is inspired by ancient Greek stories and is in a way a romantic drama that ends well. It brings together a newborn supposedly exposed to the sea by order of his father, a king of course; a fraudulent public fight in which the official contender appoints a friend of his to fight in his place to make sure he will win the prize; the prize is the daughter of the king who had his son exposed to the sea, quite a gentleman that king, even in Ancient Greece. You can imagine the embroglio in the city when the rigged public fight was revealed, and then when the real identity of the main culprit was revealed by accident just minutes before he was executed for his fraud, standing there in a white robe on Jupiter’s altar, the executing tools already brandished by order of his own real but unknown father. And the gentleman of a king does not even seem polite enough to excuse himself, to say he was sorry for his totally inhumane decisions in his life. Luckily in all the cases I have been able to listen to, the music saves the story.
And imagine the main culprit, the “champion” who asks his friend to fight for him, is thus trying to conquer the daughter of the local king who is in love with his own friend and who is loved by this very friend. He is trying to steal the love of his friend, after having abandoned the woman he loved in his country, Crete, in order to come to Greece to be able to conquer this daughter of a barbaric father. A French Revolution is definitely needed in this opera topic. Luckily, Beaumarchais and Mozart were supposed to come soon and were already there when Mysliveček produced his version of the tale in 1778 since Beaumarchais produced his play “Le Mariage de Figaro” in Paris in 1778. Mozart composed his “Marriage of Figaro” in 1786 in Vienna, Austria, premiere performance on May 1st, announcing, a century before the Chicago massacre, the famous Labor Day of May 1st still celebrated today. Once a Freemason, always a Freemason.
L’Olimpiade is an opera on a libretto that was extremely popular in the 18th century in Italy and Europe. The plot is in many ways repulsive: cheating in the Olympic Games. Stealing the woman your friend loves and who loves your friend. Getting rid of the first lover you had for a woman you desire but who will never love you since she loves your friend. She knows you are a cheater, a monster in many ways.
But her father, the king of Sicione is even worse. He had had in the past his son exposed to the sea, in other words, thrown into the sea when a newborn for him to drown. Then he turned his daughter into the prize of a sports event, a fight of some type between several champions: the winner can marry the daughter. Obnoxious.
And he discovers the cheater he has just condemned to be sacrificed on the main altar of the city is his son. He does not even beg for pity and forgiveness. He just accepts the situation and decides – like the king he pretends to be – the son will marry the woman he abandoned in Crete and his friend will marry his daughter, I mean the king’s daughter of course.
How can you save such a pathetic plot? In the 18th century, it was already difficult. Think of The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart or Le Marriage de Figaro by Beaumarchais. The main nobleman, a count if I remember well these useless but meaningful details, sees his authority, his privileges rejected and contained by his wife and the servants of the house, Figaro of course first of all. How can we today find it funny to celebrate a cheater, a liar, a vindicative violent person, and it all has to, ought to, and must be excused because of his drastic fate dictated by his own father and a disobedient servant who is the only humane and modern character: A servant does not have to obey an order if it goes against his own ethics.
“Une querelle de salon: France, Italie, Espagne”, Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature (Tubinga), 33, 64, 2006, pp. 269-276. ISSN: 0343-9368.
A recent but bad film on Jack the Ripper identified as the dissecting morgue doctor who does his homework at night in the streets by killing prostitutes and then dissects them a second time the following day to write a report about the great skill of the killer who must have a high level of medical and surgical training. You can imagine how he knows.
Why he does it is absolutely nil. He is an alcoholic, and his wife refuses to have any sexual contact with him as long as he drinks his daily liquor. So, he compensates for his shortage of flesh pleasures by killing prostitutes but remains faithful to his wife by not using these prostitutes according to their profession.
Prokofiev produced great ballet music with this Cinderella, but the ballet by Matthew Bourne is very mediocre and extremely morbid, as if the evocation of the 1940 Battle of London were something palatable today, except if you want to prepare the audience to the horrible thing that is happening in the slow falling of the American and Western Empire. Don’t worry it will happen, and soon, though progressively, and they will be tempted to drop an atom bomb on Moscow or Gaza, but will they dare? Why not Beijing? I am sure that some are dreaming of it, like a certain Goldwater who wanted to drop one on Hanoi, in the good old days of the US crushing the whole world under their constant blackmail to erase humanity from this sorry planet.
I just published Franz Liszt and Sel Love / Franz Liszt et l’Amour de Soi. Three concerts and all the years of pilgrimage, when Liszt is looking for himself, for his national base, and for love that does not betray the lover. But there might be some hope in loving your own self and retiring to some solitude with yourself, and you can add God on the table for entertainment. But it is so easy and superficial to point at this God on the table as the mark of some religious impasse at the dead end of a blind alley that is nothing but a cul de sac for the good old traditional anti-religious French who can only see religion as sectarian bigotry that has to be tolerated but neglected as insignificant.
Gros dossier principalement en Français sur Agrippine de Handel à Cyrano de Bergerac en passant par Daniel Mesguich et Philippe Jaroussky. De l'horreur d'une mise à mort à la beauté d'une transcendance dans justement cette horreur. Cauchemars de lumière et de couleur guarantis. N'oubliez jamais que le sang est rouge. Avez-vous jamais passé de vie à trépas avec une pierre très lourde sur la piptrine qui progressivement vous écrase et vous coupe le souffle, definitivement, toute votre famille et toute la bonne société et toute la populace admirant votre courage? Et le peuple demande que la trahison soit châtiée jusqu'à la troisième génération. Bien du plaisir en perspective.
Josef Mysliveček was from Prag, and he went to Venice and Italy to learn about opera, THE opera that was being born in Italy, the country of Bel Canto. Though you have all sorts of Soprani and Countertenors in the few scenes on opera stages, and the voice of Philippe Jaroussky for these Castrati of the time, the composer is so narrowly promiscuous with women, to the point of considering he has to love them physically to make them sing, even once with a slap across the face, that he ruined the best soprano he had under his conductor’s baton who ended up in a convent and died in the bed of her Mother Superior. When did he even consider that she was a lesbian? And the absence of real references to the Castrati is also surprising on the Italian opera stage, notwithstanding the rivalry on the stage between the soprani and the castrati.
That’s the short coming of the film that is announced as a biopic of the composer. Much is missing about what was that opera being delivered in Italy and that was going to be transformed into what it has been since by Handel, a German Composer in England, and Mozart an Austria composer who supposedly admired our Josef Mysliveček. The scene with Mozart, age 12 or so, with his gout-ridden father slumped in an armchair with his gouty leg on a tea table, is not exploited as it should have been. Mozart asks the Maestro for a small piece. The Maestro obliges and performs on the harpsichord a small, pleasant piece, though rather simple if not maybe cold. Then Mozart captures the harpsichord and improvises a variation on this piece he has only heard once, and this time it is quite longer, lighter, fiery even, with of course too many notes, but brilliantly so. The Maestro simply thanks Mozart instead of entering the game and pushing it further.
But the production is brilliant, colorful and the end is miserable and so pitiful. Syphilis was a real epidemic in those days, always lethal and highly contagious. Great creators were not very careful about their “promiscuity” and they ended up in the cemetery not to play some death march,; Masonic or not, but to go down or rather be lowered down into their graves. We do remember AIDS.
“L’enlèvement de Mlle de Montmorency-Boutteville et de la fille de Lope de Vega. Un événement de cour en France et un événement domestique en Espagne au XVIIe siècleˮ, Poésie de cour et de circonstance, théâtre historique. La mise en vers de l’événement dans les mondes hispanique et européen. XVIe-XVIIe siècles, Marie-Laure Acquier y Emmanuel Marigno (dirs.), París, L’Harmattan, 2014, pp. 267-276. ISBN: 978-2-343-02790-6.
L’Olimpiade is an opera on a libretto that was extremely popular in the 18th century in Italy and Europe. The plot is in many ways repulsive: cheating in the Olympic Games. Stealing the woman your friend loves and who loves your friend. Getting rid of the first lover you had for a woman you desire but who will never love you since she loves your friend. She knows you are a cheater, a monster in many ways.
But her father, the king of Sicione is even worse. He had had in the past his son exposed to the sea, in other words, thrown into the sea when a newborn for him to drown. Then he turned his daughter into the prize of a sports event, a fight of some type between several champions: the winner can marry the daughter. Obnoxious.
And he discovers the cheater he has just condemned to be sacrificed on the main altar of the city is his son. He does not even beg for pity and forgiveness. He just accepts the situation and decides – like the king he pretends to be – the son will marry the woman he abandoned in Crete and his friend will marry his daughter, I mean the king’s daughter of course.
How can you save such a pathetic plot? In the 18th century, it was already difficult. Think of The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart or Le Marriage de Figaro by Beaumarchais. The main nobleman, a count if I remember well these useless but meaningful details, sees his authority, his privileges rejected and contained by his wife and the servants of the house, Figaro of course first of all. How can we today find it funny to celebrate a cheater, a liar, a vindicative violent person, and it all has to, ought to, and must be excused because of his drastic fate dictated by his own father and a disobedient servant who is the only humane and modern character: A servant does not have to obey an order if it goes against his own ethics.
“Une querelle de salon: France, Italie, Espagne”, Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature (Tubinga), 33, 64, 2006, pp. 269-276. ISSN: 0343-9368.
A recent but bad film on Jack the Ripper identified as the dissecting morgue doctor who does his homework at night in the streets by killing prostitutes and then dissects them a second time the following day to write a report about the great skill of the killer who must have a high level of medical and surgical training. You can imagine how he knows.
Why he does it is absolutely nil. He is an alcoholic, and his wife refuses to have any sexual contact with him as long as he drinks his daily liquor. So, he compensates for his shortage of flesh pleasures by killing prostitutes but remains faithful to his wife by not using these prostitutes according to their profession.
Prokofiev produced great ballet music with this Cinderella, but the ballet by Matthew Bourne is very mediocre and extremely morbid, as if the evocation of the 1940 Battle of London were something palatable today, except if you want to prepare the audience to the horrible thing that is happening in the slow falling of the American and Western Empire. Don’t worry it will happen, and soon, though progressively, and they will be tempted to drop an atom bomb on Moscow or Gaza, but will they dare? Why not Beijing? I am sure that some are dreaming of it, like a certain Goldwater who wanted to drop one on Hanoi, in the good old days of the US crushing the whole world under their constant blackmail to erase humanity from this sorry planet.
I just published Franz Liszt and Sel Love / Franz Liszt et l’Amour de Soi. Three concerts and all the years of pilgrimage, when Liszt is looking for himself, for his national base, and for love that does not betray the lover. But there might be some hope in loving your own self and retiring to some solitude with yourself, and you can add God on the table for entertainment. But it is so easy and superficial to point at this God on the table as the mark of some religious impasse at the dead end of a blind alley that is nothing but a cul de sac for the good old traditional anti-religious French who can only see religion as sectarian bigotry that has to be tolerated but neglected as insignificant.
Gros dossier principalement en Français sur Agrippine de Handel à Cyrano de Bergerac en passant par Daniel Mesguich et Philippe Jaroussky. De l'horreur d'une mise à mort à la beauté d'une transcendance dans justement cette horreur. Cauchemars de lumière et de couleur guarantis. N'oubliez jamais que le sang est rouge. Avez-vous jamais passé de vie à trépas avec une pierre très lourde sur la piptrine qui progressivement vous écrase et vous coupe le souffle, definitivement, toute votre famille et toute la bonne société et toute la populace admirant votre courage? Et le peuple demande que la trahison soit châtiée jusqu'à la troisième génération. Bien du plaisir en perspective.
Josef Mysliveček was from Prag, and he went to Venice and Italy to learn about opera, THE opera that was being born in Italy, the country of Bel Canto. Though you have all sorts of Soprani and Countertenors in the few scenes on opera stages, and the voice of Philippe Jaroussky for these Castrati of the time, the composer is so narrowly promiscuous with women, to the point of considering he has to love them physically to make them sing, even once with a slap across the face, that he ruined the best soprano he had under his conductor’s baton who ended up in a convent and died in the bed of her Mother Superior. When did he even consider that she was a lesbian? And the absence of real references to the Castrati is also surprising on the Italian opera stage, notwithstanding the rivalry on the stage between the soprani and the castrati.
That’s the short coming of the film that is announced as a biopic of the composer. Much is missing about what was that opera being delivered in Italy and that was going to be transformed into what it has been since by Handel, a German Composer in England, and Mozart an Austria composer who supposedly admired our Josef Mysliveček. The scene with Mozart, age 12 or so, with his gout-ridden father slumped in an armchair with his gouty leg on a tea table, is not exploited as it should have been. Mozart asks the Maestro for a small piece. The Maestro obliges and performs on the harpsichord a small, pleasant piece, though rather simple if not maybe cold. Then Mozart captures the harpsichord and improvises a variation on this piece he has only heard once, and this time it is quite longer, lighter, fiery even, with of course too many notes, but brilliantly so. The Maestro simply thanks Mozart instead of entering the game and pushing it further.
But the production is brilliant, colorful and the end is miserable and so pitiful. Syphilis was a real epidemic in those days, always lethal and highly contagious. Great creators were not very careful about their “promiscuity” and they ended up in the cemetery not to play some death march,; Masonic or not, but to go down or rather be lowered down into their graves. We do remember AIDS.
“L’enlèvement de Mlle de Montmorency-Boutteville et de la fille de Lope de Vega. Un événement de cour en France et un événement domestique en Espagne au XVIIe siècleˮ, Poésie de cour et de circonstance, théâtre historique. La mise en vers de l’événement dans les mondes hispanique et européen. XVIe-XVIIe siècles, Marie-Laure Acquier y Emmanuel Marigno (dirs.), París, L’Harmattan, 2014, pp. 267-276. ISBN: 978-2-343-02790-6.
“La réception du réalisme espagnol en France”, Réalisme et réalité en question au XVIIe siècle, Didier Souiller (ed.), Dijon, Presses de l’Université de Bourgogne, 2002, pp. 121-130. ISBN: 978-2913003118.
2.Les tragédies de William Shakespeare dans la peinture (2).ppsxguimera
le roi Lear criant aux cieux orageux par William Dyce,
Ophélie dans le "ruisseau qui pleure" de John Everett Millais
quand les belles tragédies de William Shakespeare inspirent les peintres …
Nothing darker than the birth of Nazism in Vienna. Pitiful and pathetic, antisemite and jingoistic. Everything foreigner is rejected except if they accept to be dominated. At the same time, the Austrian and their emperor are trying to pacify the Russians who are having their first revolution in 1905. But two more are coming, including the Bolshevik revolution. The first world war was the moment when the Americans had a war by proxy at first. Then they sent troops to bring it to an end and impose their vision of a world dominated by them. Unluckily the Soviet Union was born from this war and it disturbed the imperialistic plans of Monroe's Doctrine of the Manifest Destiny of the USA. These calculations of our chief imperialists will also bring Hitler to Germany, and the Shoah. And that was only the beginning.
Hitler was born in Vienna and he grew up at the beginning of the 20th century surrounded by nationalism, antisemitism, exploitation of the poor, and rejection of women. He is the child of this miserable segregationist city. What do you think?
L'offre Hopshow, clé en main :
Faites votre choix parmi une trentaine de spectacles et bénéficiez de nos conseils.
Créer une rencontre particulière. Les artistes sont disponibles pour échanger avec les élèves.
Facilité la logistique : pas de déplacements à prévoir, pas d'heures de cours à rattraper, ect.
Appuyez vous les arts du spectacle pour accompagner le programme ou ouvrir le débat sur l'actualité.
Nous sommes disponibles pour venir vous présenter nos spectacles et vous accompagner pour organiser une représentation !
Contact
victorien@hopshow.fr
06 37 65 36 65
51. “Les adaptations dramaturgiques des romans et nouvelles espagnols au XVIIe siècle”, Le Roman mis en scène, Catherine Douzou et Frank Greiner (eds.), París, Classiques Garnier, 2012, pp. 59-78. ISBN: 978-2-8124-0809-0.
Il sera question ici d’un événement qui eut un grand retentissement dans la société de la première moitié du dix-septième siècle, et dont on trouve l’écho chez quelques poètes de Cour: l’enlèvement de Mlle de Boutteville. L’anecdote historique intéresse moins que le motif littéraire de l’enlèvement. Une comparaison avec une églogue de Lope de Vega permettra de mieux nous ajuster au thème central du colloque.
Bernard Marr just published Generative AI in Practice (1), which brings together the matter he has been dealing with on his blogs: Artificial Intelligence from the simple practical point of view of a user along with a systematic question about what can the consequences be for the various jobs these users have? But the book is always schematic when it shows the negative consequences will not compare with the positive consequences, though bad or good, they will require a lot of changes in the way we work, the jobs available, and the mindset of the users.
Bernard Marr does not insist so much on the negative sides of GenAI, but he does list them, particularly all sorts of cheating by using GenAI to replace one’s own writing work, all types of misuse of the intellectual property of such mechanical production of text, images, videos or any other copyrightable product that the user presents as his/her own.
But he does not enter the details, and thus he remains superficial. The problems of misinformation, hallucination, and bias are a lot less important, even with deep fakes, though Bernard Marr remains superficial on such dangers. He considers these GenAI products more like patentable or trademark problems, which they are but that’s the only side or point of view of the businesses using this technology.
At the present moment, lawsuits are emerging on the Intellectual Property front with people getting ready to go to court for unauthorized use of protected data and items within LLMs, or the use of voices, slightly synthesized (hence plagiarism and plain theft) as commercial products sold with an unshared profit. I will concentrate, in the second part, on chapter 10 on education to enter some details I know from the practice of self-learning at many levels of the educational system. (2)
Les Arts en Balade in Clermont-Ferrand this month of May 2024 were a success because they expanded to two cities outside Clermont conurbation, Thiers and Vic-Le-Comte, there were many people everywhere, there were 240+ artists or groups in about the same number of places: public spaces dedicated for such events, supportive professional institutions like the Order of Lawyers and the Order of Architects, many stores of all sorts opening their businesses to one or two artists, and also many apartments in the city transformed into workshops where artists could present their work. They were also a success because they lasted four days and were just as dense on Friday, May 17 as on the three following days up to Monday, May 20. Note the case of Michelin who opened their conference rooms and galleries in their Headquarters to three artists with a very good service guiding the visitors and making feel, equally at ease, the audience and the works of art, even from some green challenge declared to be ecological. Thank God we are not in the Orsay Museum of Le Louvre
This complete covering of the event I was able to work on, plus some suggestions for further development and opening to other arts than only plastic arts inside exhibition rooms or halls and on portable media. The opinions and tips are just mine of course, not those of an Artificial Intelligence requested to caress the wild artistic animals of this event smoothly and avoid ruffling their hairs. I apologize if some find it slightly rough at times. Arts are often harsh, and thus critics have to be harsh too. To critically cover an art exhibition is a love affair, and as they say in French, we could pretend that good lovers are also good at chastising those they love.
Les Arts en Balade à Clermont-Ferrand ce mois de mai 2024 ont été un succès car ils se sont étendus à deux villes hors agglomération clermontoise, Thiers et Vic-Le-Comte, il y avait beaucoup de monde partout, il y avait plus de 240 artistes ou groupes dans environ le même nombre de lieux : des espaces publics dédiés à de tels événements, des institutions professionnelles exprimant ainsi leur soutien comme l'Ordre des Avocats et l'Ordre des Architectes, de nombreux magasins en tout genre ouvrant leurs commerces à un ou deux artistes, mais aussi de nombreux appartements en ville transformés en ateliers. où les artistes pouvaient présenter leur travail. Ils furent également une réussite car ils durèrent quatre jours et furent tout aussi denses le vendredi 17 mai que les trois jours suivants jusqu'au lundi 20 mai. A noter le cas de Michelin qui a ouvert ses salles de conférence et d’exposition à son siège social à trois artistes avec un très bon service guidant les visiteurs et faisant sentir, également à l'aise, le public et les œuvres d'art, même de quelque défi vert déclaré écologique. Dieu merci, nous ne sommes pas au Musée d'Orsay ou du Louvre
Ce reportage complet de l'événement sur lequel j'ai pu travailler, ainsi que ...
A novel of political fiction that does not reach science-fiction but wants to tell us a lot about the modern world and what the choices are for us in this decaying future. The pattern, the Gestalt of this book seems to be that no matter what humans try to do, good or bad, progressive or reactionary, democratic or dictatorial, there is no hope and no future for those initiatives. Any attempt at changing the decaying world we live in is doomed to be a failure.
What is history? The production of what happens in our world, in fact, in the cosmos, and no human individual, no human crowd, no human anything can control or change the course of such events. If by any chance we want to understand what makes history, we have to consider billions, maybe trillions of parameters in the cosmos and we, the human dwarves we are, do not even control half a dozen of them and our vanity makes us believe we can command the cosmos because we want to be gods. In the old days and in other civilizations than the Western denied Bible, they were humble enough to give this power to a God that was not of the human species.
Here Salman Rushdie follows a witch bewitched by a goddess who pretends she can create a whole empire from a bag, or rather a sack of seeds, and this leads to a total and pitiful defeat and absolute termination of the attempt, but it means Salman Rushdie is predicting that all the positive elements his witch tries, religious tolerance, education for boys and girls equally, women’s rights, gender-friendly policies, peace and coexistence, and finally freedom of expression are all doomed to fail and crumble as soon as they reach some height. In other words, his novel and his vision are the rewriting of the Babel Tower myth.
Sorry boys and girls, no future for any progressive dream, just as much as for any regressive nightmare. Life and history are neither a dream nor a nightmare. They are nothing but cosmic determinism governed by the cosmos itself, and we can be happy with the fact our world is not in a black hole. But after all, maybe that’s the destiny and fate of humanity, to end up in a bottomless black hole.
This series is very well done, suspenseful, at least as much as possible, twisted and distorted like any crime series should be but unluckily it is biased. It states to anyone who wants to listen that crime has roots in only one thing: family dysfunctioning and nothing else. The fact that society leads some people who do not fit in the standard mold to rebellion, frustration and violence by being biased against them and bullying them all the time and if they want to have contacts with people, they have to go down on their knees and beg for a favor.
That’s too bad because the cases in this rural north Wales area deserve a lot better, and probably, a more open vision of crime in this community.
LA CHAISE-DIEU MÉDIÉVALE & LA RÉVOLUTION BÉNÉDICTINE--MEDIEVAL LA CHAISE-DIEU...Editions La Dondaine
On July 13, 2024, at La Chaise-Dieu, the European Network of Casadean Sites will present a public conference on the topic of the Benedictine Revolution in Livradois-Forez, led by the La Chaise-Dieu Abbaye, starting a bit earlier with the religious reform brought up by Charlemagne in the 9th century. The Abbaye was founded less than 200 years later. The conference will focus the discussion – and it has to be a discussion – on the consequences of the Carolingian religious reform, the agricultural revolution with the invention of the horse collar and the management of the land, the rotation of crops, cultivation, and fertilization. Then the proto-industrial revolution that will bring five types of watermills for grain, oil, tan, hemp (fiber and cloth), and slightly later paper. This will make Livradois-Forez an essential region producing hemp cables and hemp cloth for ships. The first result was 75 days without any work in the year, no work before and after morning and evening angelus, and a pause with midday angelus. The second result was better food and demographical expansion, up to the end of the 13th century.
Then things became darker. Overpopulation brought unrest and all sorts of contests and conflicts at the religious level itself (Crusades in the Middle East, but also against the Cathars in France. Then in 1346, the Black Death, a pandemic in Europe of the bubonic plague, caused a tremendous level of deaths. Then, the One Hundred Years War started in 1337. The resilience of the population enabled Europe in general to go through, and around 1450 the printing press was developed by Gutenberg enabling the printing of books for the highly-needed university training of great numbers of people to bring Europe back on its feet. The Renaissance was the result of this period, a tremendously positive and creative period, and at the same time, a highly-disturbed era with The Reformation, and the religious wars that concerned all countries at a time when nationalism was emerging.
Two speakers-debaters will present the five or six centuries concerned as fast as possible to let the audience debate questions like:
1- The influence and impact of Charlemagne’s religious reform.
2- The feudal system: land ownership and serfdom.
3- The role of technology to produce energy, replace human work, and develop new products.
4- Religious tensions with Avignon and Rome conformist Popes.
5- The role of The Inquisition and religious justice.
6- The fate of the cable industry when Omerin In Ambert is number one in Europe or the world for various high-security and high-technicity cables.
7- The culture: architecture, music, painting, carving, theater, oratorio and opera, literature.
It will take place at LA CHAISE-DIEU – AUDITORIUM GEORGES CZIFFRA
SAMEDI 13 JUILLET 2024 – 14-17 HEURES 30.
The two main speakers so far are Dr Jacques COULARDEAU (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) and PhD Graduate Student Clément GOMY (Université Clermont Auvergne
“La réception du réalisme espagnol en France”, Réalisme et réalité en question au XVIIe siècle, Didier Souiller (ed.), Dijon, Presses de l’Université de Bourgogne, 2002, pp. 121-130. ISBN: 978-2913003118.
2.Les tragédies de William Shakespeare dans la peinture (2).ppsxguimera
le roi Lear criant aux cieux orageux par William Dyce,
Ophélie dans le "ruisseau qui pleure" de John Everett Millais
quand les belles tragédies de William Shakespeare inspirent les peintres …
Nothing darker than the birth of Nazism in Vienna. Pitiful and pathetic, antisemite and jingoistic. Everything foreigner is rejected except if they accept to be dominated. At the same time, the Austrian and their emperor are trying to pacify the Russians who are having their first revolution in 1905. But two more are coming, including the Bolshevik revolution. The first world war was the moment when the Americans had a war by proxy at first. Then they sent troops to bring it to an end and impose their vision of a world dominated by them. Unluckily the Soviet Union was born from this war and it disturbed the imperialistic plans of Monroe's Doctrine of the Manifest Destiny of the USA. These calculations of our chief imperialists will also bring Hitler to Germany, and the Shoah. And that was only the beginning.
Hitler was born in Vienna and he grew up at the beginning of the 20th century surrounded by nationalism, antisemitism, exploitation of the poor, and rejection of women. He is the child of this miserable segregationist city. What do you think?
L'offre Hopshow, clé en main :
Faites votre choix parmi une trentaine de spectacles et bénéficiez de nos conseils.
Créer une rencontre particulière. Les artistes sont disponibles pour échanger avec les élèves.
Facilité la logistique : pas de déplacements à prévoir, pas d'heures de cours à rattraper, ect.
Appuyez vous les arts du spectacle pour accompagner le programme ou ouvrir le débat sur l'actualité.
Nous sommes disponibles pour venir vous présenter nos spectacles et vous accompagner pour organiser une représentation !
Contact
victorien@hopshow.fr
06 37 65 36 65
51. “Les adaptations dramaturgiques des romans et nouvelles espagnols au XVIIe siècle”, Le Roman mis en scène, Catherine Douzou et Frank Greiner (eds.), París, Classiques Garnier, 2012, pp. 59-78. ISBN: 978-2-8124-0809-0.
Il sera question ici d’un événement qui eut un grand retentissement dans la société de la première moitié du dix-septième siècle, et dont on trouve l’écho chez quelques poètes de Cour: l’enlèvement de Mlle de Boutteville. L’anecdote historique intéresse moins que le motif littéraire de l’enlèvement. Une comparaison avec une églogue de Lope de Vega permettra de mieux nous ajuster au thème central du colloque.
Bernard Marr just published Generative AI in Practice (1), which brings together the matter he has been dealing with on his blogs: Artificial Intelligence from the simple practical point of view of a user along with a systematic question about what can the consequences be for the various jobs these users have? But the book is always schematic when it shows the negative consequences will not compare with the positive consequences, though bad or good, they will require a lot of changes in the way we work, the jobs available, and the mindset of the users.
Bernard Marr does not insist so much on the negative sides of GenAI, but he does list them, particularly all sorts of cheating by using GenAI to replace one’s own writing work, all types of misuse of the intellectual property of such mechanical production of text, images, videos or any other copyrightable product that the user presents as his/her own.
But he does not enter the details, and thus he remains superficial. The problems of misinformation, hallucination, and bias are a lot less important, even with deep fakes, though Bernard Marr remains superficial on such dangers. He considers these GenAI products more like patentable or trademark problems, which they are but that’s the only side or point of view of the businesses using this technology.
At the present moment, lawsuits are emerging on the Intellectual Property front with people getting ready to go to court for unauthorized use of protected data and items within LLMs, or the use of voices, slightly synthesized (hence plagiarism and plain theft) as commercial products sold with an unshared profit. I will concentrate, in the second part, on chapter 10 on education to enter some details I know from the practice of self-learning at many levels of the educational system. (2)
Les Arts en Balade in Clermont-Ferrand this month of May 2024 were a success because they expanded to two cities outside Clermont conurbation, Thiers and Vic-Le-Comte, there were many people everywhere, there were 240+ artists or groups in about the same number of places: public spaces dedicated for such events, supportive professional institutions like the Order of Lawyers and the Order of Architects, many stores of all sorts opening their businesses to one or two artists, and also many apartments in the city transformed into workshops where artists could present their work. They were also a success because they lasted four days and were just as dense on Friday, May 17 as on the three following days up to Monday, May 20. Note the case of Michelin who opened their conference rooms and galleries in their Headquarters to three artists with a very good service guiding the visitors and making feel, equally at ease, the audience and the works of art, even from some green challenge declared to be ecological. Thank God we are not in the Orsay Museum of Le Louvre
This complete covering of the event I was able to work on, plus some suggestions for further development and opening to other arts than only plastic arts inside exhibition rooms or halls and on portable media. The opinions and tips are just mine of course, not those of an Artificial Intelligence requested to caress the wild artistic animals of this event smoothly and avoid ruffling their hairs. I apologize if some find it slightly rough at times. Arts are often harsh, and thus critics have to be harsh too. To critically cover an art exhibition is a love affair, and as they say in French, we could pretend that good lovers are also good at chastising those they love.
Les Arts en Balade à Clermont-Ferrand ce mois de mai 2024 ont été un succès car ils se sont étendus à deux villes hors agglomération clermontoise, Thiers et Vic-Le-Comte, il y avait beaucoup de monde partout, il y avait plus de 240 artistes ou groupes dans environ le même nombre de lieux : des espaces publics dédiés à de tels événements, des institutions professionnelles exprimant ainsi leur soutien comme l'Ordre des Avocats et l'Ordre des Architectes, de nombreux magasins en tout genre ouvrant leurs commerces à un ou deux artistes, mais aussi de nombreux appartements en ville transformés en ateliers. où les artistes pouvaient présenter leur travail. Ils furent également une réussite car ils durèrent quatre jours et furent tout aussi denses le vendredi 17 mai que les trois jours suivants jusqu'au lundi 20 mai. A noter le cas de Michelin qui a ouvert ses salles de conférence et d’exposition à son siège social à trois artistes avec un très bon service guidant les visiteurs et faisant sentir, également à l'aise, le public et les œuvres d'art, même de quelque défi vert déclaré écologique. Dieu merci, nous ne sommes pas au Musée d'Orsay ou du Louvre
Ce reportage complet de l'événement sur lequel j'ai pu travailler, ainsi que ...
A novel of political fiction that does not reach science-fiction but wants to tell us a lot about the modern world and what the choices are for us in this decaying future. The pattern, the Gestalt of this book seems to be that no matter what humans try to do, good or bad, progressive or reactionary, democratic or dictatorial, there is no hope and no future for those initiatives. Any attempt at changing the decaying world we live in is doomed to be a failure.
What is history? The production of what happens in our world, in fact, in the cosmos, and no human individual, no human crowd, no human anything can control or change the course of such events. If by any chance we want to understand what makes history, we have to consider billions, maybe trillions of parameters in the cosmos and we, the human dwarves we are, do not even control half a dozen of them and our vanity makes us believe we can command the cosmos because we want to be gods. In the old days and in other civilizations than the Western denied Bible, they were humble enough to give this power to a God that was not of the human species.
Here Salman Rushdie follows a witch bewitched by a goddess who pretends she can create a whole empire from a bag, or rather a sack of seeds, and this leads to a total and pitiful defeat and absolute termination of the attempt, but it means Salman Rushdie is predicting that all the positive elements his witch tries, religious tolerance, education for boys and girls equally, women’s rights, gender-friendly policies, peace and coexistence, and finally freedom of expression are all doomed to fail and crumble as soon as they reach some height. In other words, his novel and his vision are the rewriting of the Babel Tower myth.
Sorry boys and girls, no future for any progressive dream, just as much as for any regressive nightmare. Life and history are neither a dream nor a nightmare. They are nothing but cosmic determinism governed by the cosmos itself, and we can be happy with the fact our world is not in a black hole. But after all, maybe that’s the destiny and fate of humanity, to end up in a bottomless black hole.
This series is very well done, suspenseful, at least as much as possible, twisted and distorted like any crime series should be but unluckily it is biased. It states to anyone who wants to listen that crime has roots in only one thing: family dysfunctioning and nothing else. The fact that society leads some people who do not fit in the standard mold to rebellion, frustration and violence by being biased against them and bullying them all the time and if they want to have contacts with people, they have to go down on their knees and beg for a favor.
That’s too bad because the cases in this rural north Wales area deserve a lot better, and probably, a more open vision of crime in this community.
LA CHAISE-DIEU MÉDIÉVALE & LA RÉVOLUTION BÉNÉDICTINE--MEDIEVAL LA CHAISE-DIEU...Editions La Dondaine
On July 13, 2024, at La Chaise-Dieu, the European Network of Casadean Sites will present a public conference on the topic of the Benedictine Revolution in Livradois-Forez, led by the La Chaise-Dieu Abbaye, starting a bit earlier with the religious reform brought up by Charlemagne in the 9th century. The Abbaye was founded less than 200 years later. The conference will focus the discussion – and it has to be a discussion – on the consequences of the Carolingian religious reform, the agricultural revolution with the invention of the horse collar and the management of the land, the rotation of crops, cultivation, and fertilization. Then the proto-industrial revolution that will bring five types of watermills for grain, oil, tan, hemp (fiber and cloth), and slightly later paper. This will make Livradois-Forez an essential region producing hemp cables and hemp cloth for ships. The first result was 75 days without any work in the year, no work before and after morning and evening angelus, and a pause with midday angelus. The second result was better food and demographical expansion, up to the end of the 13th century.
Then things became darker. Overpopulation brought unrest and all sorts of contests and conflicts at the religious level itself (Crusades in the Middle East, but also against the Cathars in France. Then in 1346, the Black Death, a pandemic in Europe of the bubonic plague, caused a tremendous level of deaths. Then, the One Hundred Years War started in 1337. The resilience of the population enabled Europe in general to go through, and around 1450 the printing press was developed by Gutenberg enabling the printing of books for the highly-needed university training of great numbers of people to bring Europe back on its feet. The Renaissance was the result of this period, a tremendously positive and creative period, and at the same time, a highly-disturbed era with The Reformation, and the religious wars that concerned all countries at a time when nationalism was emerging.
Two speakers-debaters will present the five or six centuries concerned as fast as possible to let the audience debate questions like:
1- The influence and impact of Charlemagne’s religious reform.
2- The feudal system: land ownership and serfdom.
3- The role of technology to produce energy, replace human work, and develop new products.
4- Religious tensions with Avignon and Rome conformist Popes.
5- The role of The Inquisition and religious justice.
6- The fate of the cable industry when Omerin In Ambert is number one in Europe or the world for various high-security and high-technicity cables.
7- The culture: architecture, music, painting, carving, theater, oratorio and opera, literature.
It will take place at LA CHAISE-DIEU – AUDITORIUM GEORGES CZIFFRA
SAMEDI 13 JUILLET 2024 – 14-17 HEURES 30.
The two main speakers so far are Dr Jacques COULARDEAU (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) and PhD Graduate Student Clément GOMY (Université Clermont Auvergne
Xavier Rouard searches and researches the linguistic world, scientific research of course, for the origin, the cradle, the homeland, or the motherland, of Indo-European. He is not the only one in the world, but he goes against practically all the others by positioning this linguistic nursery in Central Asia based on a Eurasian or trans-Eurasian language or languages. But precisely Eurasian languages only came into existence from the moment when syntactic-analytic Indo-Iranian languages left the Iranian plateau where they had stationed themselves when they arrived from Black Africa, some 40,000 years ago, or BCE, not much difference here. They had to go through the Ice Age first and finally get on the move after this climate event probably around 15,000 BCE, some east to the southern Asian continent, with Pakistan and India, others west down into Mesopotamia and from there to Europe. These people, on both side, encountered people who spoke other languages, Turkic agglutinative languages, and isolating Sino-Tibetan languages, mostly. These languages had integrated the Denisovans and their own language(s). Thes encountered people were hybrid Homo Sapiens with a varying proportion of Denisovan DNA in Central Asia, and the same in Mesopotamia with a varying proportion od Neanderthalensis DNA. When they reached Europe, the population was essentially of Turkic language and origin with a varying level of hybridization with European Homo Neanderthalensis. It is such encounters that generated or engendered the various Indo-European or Indo-Aryan languages
My approach is phylogenetic and thus it is absolutely impossible for me not to take into consideration the migrations and geographic, hence social, cultural and linguistic movements of these populations. That’s the basic principle of Joseph Greenberg who considered that all these migrations had only one matrix or melting pot that produced the emergence of human articulated language on the basis of what these emerging Homo Sapiens inherited from the other Hominins from which they were descending.
But Joseph Greenberg and his disciples encountered a problem: in all language you should find a certain number of words whose “roots” are universal and stable in meaning. These are the roots coming from Black Africa before any migration out of Black Africa. The problem is then that it does not enable any topology of languages. So, they, Greenberg and his disciples, tried to introduce “grammatical” or “syntactic” words, but even so it does go that far.
To get somewhere you have to ask the question about the phylogeny of articulated language(s), and there you only find three articulations in a precise order: root-languages (by the way vastly ignored by Xavier Rouard), Isolating character languages, and agglutinative as well as synthetic-analytic languages according to the migrations out of Black Africa. If you do not consider this phylogeny, then you put all sorts of languages together in the melting pot [...}
Three crime series in one entry.
First, The Brokenwood Mysteries; seasons 1 to 3.
Second, The Coroner, Complete Series.
Third, The Unforgotten, Series 1 to 4, Complete Series.
Police series, detective stories, criminal mysteries, and many other options in the field of crime and delinquency have been explored by the English from the first moment they started existing, a very long time ago.
Shakespeare and he was not the first author in the field, loved those stories of crimes and criminals, having people assassinated, or mutilated, or tortured on the stage from Titus Andronicus to Romeo and Juliet.
Dickens was a good one too in that field, but Shakespeare looked at crime from the outside, from some ethical point of view. Dickens looked at it from inside, from the point of view of the criminals themselves forced to commit crimes in order to simply survive.
Then you had Mary Shelley and her Frankenstein and then later on Dracula came into the picture, and many others trill we came across Conan Doyle who edicted the proper form of a crime story or detective story, hence an investigation of a crime we can only see from outside, and the investigation is to get into it to see how it got developed and who was the criminal.
Since then, with the radio at first, the cinema next, and finally television leading directly to streaming and the Internet, those police adventures have just become adventures, and the extreme form is what they call action films where violence is no longer criminal since it has been transformed into the ultimate survival if not the final renascence before the apocalypse.
Enjoy these series.
The Mayas are more a cultural and historical mystery than a vast field of knowledge. We know less than we can even imagine about them. Where did they come from? What language did they speak before coming to Mesoamerica? What were their beliefs before arriving in Yucatan? They brought with them cacao, chocolate, writing, mathematics, extremely advanced calendars, phenomenal knowledge about stars, planets and the cosmos. They even brought with them a vigesimal counting system with the mathematics going along with it, including the equivalent of our zero (that we borrowed from the Arabs in the 17th century) that enabled them to count up to the infinite.
The most remarkable achievement is that they managed to merge phenomenal art with the glyphic writing system of theirs. We know the glyphs were works of art, for one, and a syllabary phonetic writing system, for two. For a very long time the second aspect was rejected, particularly by Sir Eric Thompson. Luckily this untruth was rejected after his death, with a little bit of disregard before his death. The glyphs were not flat symbolic of items and purely artistic, like some kind of secondary if not superfluous decoration. The colonizing Spaniards considered that decoration as diabolical and they burned and destroyed all the books and artifacts that carried such artistic representations of Maya reality and such glyphs that could only be the language of the devil.
Imagine how surprised I was when I discovered this catalogue of an exhibition at the MET Museum of Art in New York. They provide some images of the glyphs, and even some sentences written with them. But they systematically ignore the glyphs, transliterate the sentences and words into Latin-transliterated Maya, and simply work and speculate on these transliterations and their translations into English. They lose all the richness of meaning and beauty of the glyphs. In other words, they terminate, bring to a final end the destructive work of the Spaniards, the culturicide of the Mayas and the Maya culture and civilization. My full study (about 15,000 words, only in English) is available
The 3 Literacies of Modern Age, the Trikirion of CommunicationEditions La Dondaine
Review of the Trikirion of Communication:
Symboleracy, Numeracy and Techneracy
The starting point is the phylogeny of communication because the educational topic I am going to address cannot even exist if there is no communication. We have to understand that all Hominins were communicating. Probably all Hominins after Homo Erectus included had some command of some articulated language, but only Homo Sapiens reached the comprehensive and sustainable command of the fully-articulated language, probably around 200,000 BCE.
The next great stage Is the development of representational and symbolic Inscriptions and paintings or engravings on all durable media available, rockface in caves, stone, bone, ivory, and tusks. This symbolic transcription of stories and experience, maybe some spiritual language accompanying some rituals, is the first form of writing seen as symbolic transcription and going back to 300,000 BCE with Homo Naledi, 100,000 BCE with Homo Neanderthalensis, and 50,000 with Homo Sapiens.
Syllabic and alphabetical writing only came around 3,500 BCE for Homo Sapiens. There might have been older cases, but archaeology has not yet covered the whole world for all types of symbolic inscriptions that could have led to symbolic phonetic writing. The next stage was the printing press which enabled mass education and mass communication.
ENTRE IA & LES ÉCRANS LE THÉÄTRE EST EN QUESTION
The Journal “Théâtres du Monde” has just published its 34th issue. I have two articles published in that journal. So here is first of all the table of contents of the 2024 issue, and I added to these three pages all the preparatory work I have done to write the two articles that deal with the series HUNTERS and the author Lorraine HANSBERRY. These reviews and critiques are all bilingual, English for some and French for the others.
I do feel like a raisin the sun. I also added some documents on the recent question brought up about race in the USA where some states are restricting the teaching of slavery and Black history in the USA because it may, might, would, and I think SHOULD traumatize the poor white darlings who really need some traumatization about their imperialistic ideological terrorism.
Four films or series.
1- John Woo’s Silent Night (2023),
2- Doug Liman’s Road House (2024),
3- Albert Hughes’s The Continental (2023),
4- Marcela Saïd and Julien Despaux’s Ourika (2024),
all seen on Amazon’s Prime Video, hence distributed by Amazon Prime Video, all dealing with violence in our societies and all claiming that violence is justified top answer and respond to a violent society, a violence coming from outside our community, and that outside can introduce anti-immigrant accusations or plainly racist claims, both anti-white and anti-any-ethnicity.
Does it help us understand this violence ? Does these films enable us to devise a proper response to prevent and solve such violence? Both times, a resounding NO. But in both cases, it plays in the hands of the most extreme forces on the nationalist side of life, the side that refuses to consider those who are not pure according to their definitions as the cause of all our problems, and not only those people but also all products that may come from the countries concerned by these ethnic groups. This is true in the USA, in Canada, with Mexico playing the wide-open gate to the previous two, and all over Europe.
What game are these streaming services playing? Preparing coming elections! But it might go the wrong way for them. Now what is the wrong way? Good question. No answer because the ballot boxes will be the only valid answer. First stop, the European Elections in June 2024.
Mo Xiang’s third volume of the saga on The Blessing of a Heaven Official is there in front of me and this saga is emanating with so much force that no one can resist the tanha that tells them “Go For It! There is pleasure in it all!” I am sure you want to discover the pleasure there is in these volumes, but remember the authoress is a woman and as such she develops a sweet, soft, and catching psychology that will turn you completely berserk if you do not keep your feet well anchored in the earth.
The King Ghost Hua Cheng from Ghost City is behind every move the ascended Xie Lian is inspiring or is inspired by and for. His meeting this Xie Lian after 800 years of supernatural and surreal life in our vast cosmos was so mind-stirring, intelligence-moving, and body-inspiring that the pure ascetic Buddhist he is supposed to be, nearly fell into the cauldron of eroticism. He managed not to fall, but that was very close this time since he was unconscious and Hua Cheng took advantage of the situation and pretended that he had to save his “friend” before he drowned, though Hua Cheng knew perfectly well Xie Lian could not drown, hence cannot die. But, well, Hua Cheng kissed Xie Lian unconscious as he was, I mean in his unconscious mind, because Xie Lian was unconscious, and thus he could kiss him since he could not protest. What a twisted and I guess tortured mind he is. He should try Buddhist meditation to hypnotize himself into plain decent abstinence.
But sure enough, the encounter with the Venerable of Empty Words promises to be a fair adventure in which Xie Lian’s mind and body will be chastised, abused, and even probably raped. There will be quite a lot of repair work to do on the psyche and the conscious rightfulness of our Xie Lian. I guess Hua Cheng will take advantage of such situations to steal a couple more kisses. Never trust a ghost because they have no soul anymore and they have no honor either. So, lying, pretending, and even impersonating what they are not to seduce their gullible victims is some kind of sport for these fuzzy beings, if they can really BE.
Oppenheimer is an essential character in US history. He is the left-leaning Jew who provided the USA with the Atom Bomb that enabled the US to defeat Japan faster than the planned standard land and air attack by the Soviets and the Chinese Communists, officially endorsed in the Yalta Conference ( 4–11 February 1945) by Churchill, Truman, and Stalin. Truman did not have the atomic bomb yet and will only have it in July 1945. So, he bluffed and agreed with the Soviet plan because he had no alternative … yet. He reneged his agreement in July-August 1945, and he dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. The victory over Germany was a joint effort. The victory over Japan was a self-centered and egotistic solitary procedure not even negotiated with the allies of the US. The United Kingdom might have been informed, maybe. But the USSR was not. The Americans were already and had been for nearly two centuries, on the “America First” and “Make America Great Forever” lines that we have known all along and directly since 1918.
And within 9 years Oppenheimer will be ostracized because he was leaning to the left and there were Communists around him. He submitted and disappeared in some sideline university job. He had nowhere to go, as opposed to Charlie Chaplin who went back to England. As a Jew, he could have gone to Israel, but that was not a real optimistic solution at the time. He might even have gone to the USSR with his communist wife. But he stayed put in the USA, in his closet-university-job. The film does not really explore this dilemma: hide away in the USA, go to the Jewish Israel, or go to the USSR. On one hand, it was his old depressive nature that came back. On the other hand, it would have been going back to his faith and his roots, even if it could have looked like treason. On the third hand, on yet another other hand, it would have been plain treason.
THE DESCENT TO HELL IN THREE STAGES – 2003-2015-2019
I brought together three films and series presented here both in English and French in anti-chronological order.
1- The film 7500, 2019.
2- The series Blindspot, 2015-2020.
3- The film The Dreamers, 2003
If you take them in this backward order, you may understand that today’s world is not at all different from the one in 1968 when the Vietnam War was going on full blast, the Chinese Cultural Revolution was in full swing and the West per se was living its first full sexual revolution with the arrival of the baby-boomers to the full unquenchable desire to hormonally and fully enjoy life. Have some interesting reading.
FIRST STAGE – AMAZON STUDIOS – 7500 – 2019
There is little to say about such a film. It is just artificial entertainment that shows nothing and proves nothing. It is all stressing detail to keep the audience glued to the screen.
SECOND STAGE – BLINDSPOT – FULL SERIES – FIVE SEASONS – 2015-2020
A very long series for very little apart from stressed and stressful situations that always end well anyway, meaning leading to a worse situation in the next episode.
THIRD STAGE – BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI – THE DREAMERS – 2003
Paris Spring 1968. We all know what happened then in France. The victory of the unions, the defeat of the left, and the impossibility for the left to understand that any “events” of that sort will always lead to the victory of the right in the next elections, and today we have to update the data and say the victory of the extreme right. It might be slightly more complex, but basically, that’s what it is and when the left wins this social-minded left will become conservative within at the most two years and it might even turn reactionary within these two years, at times even less. They like power so much.
Amazon Prime Video and Blumhouse Productions love dysfunctioning mothers who, in the name of their love for their children, are ready to kill anyone only on their gut feelings that this anyone is guilty of who knows what apart from the devil.
The film is tricky enough to lure and fool the audience, and the horror of the racist and dysfunctional situation can be believed till the end when the trick is revealed. Note this revelation implies that all daughters from divorced or motherless families are by definition, even by principle, liars.
You might also find the father falling in an ice-cold river under a blizzard of some sort funny, and with his winter coat on, and then he goes on parading around outside, in the unheated car, and even in some kind of social situation without changing his freezing clothes. Like at the Oscars yesterday the costume design Oscar was delivered to a costume designer wearing no clothes at all, except a small cardboard sign where sexually necessary for the picture, meaning that costume designers are so badly treated and paid that they cannot even afford to buy underwear.
A little bit more about the context, schools, religion, Islam and girls, divorced parents, single Muslim male parent, etc. would have maybe given some depth to the story and made it less artificial.
A film that wants to be science-fiction. So, learn the lessons that emerge from it.
1- Let black doctors or scientists get into a hospital “laboratory” and the most unimaginable horrors will take place.
2- Let black people be fully treated in a hospital and they will become guinea pigs, especially in the hands of black doctors.
3- Let a mother treat her son and the worst possible crime will take place under your own nose and in front of your own eyes.
4- Shall I go on?
If this is not pure racism laced with some sexism, I just wonder what would qualify. How can anyone imagine such man-made scientific schizophrenia to be possible in the hands and under the scalpel of a doctor, a scientist? I guess it is urgent to have clear regulations and controls on such activities. Because be sure that wild clandestine medical experiments are happening every day in the world.
Duration is all that plants and animals experience. They last as long as either possible or necessary. When the phylogenic target of bringing in the next generation of life is fulfilled, the plant or the animal can die or wither away. Homo Sapiens, and probably most Hominins developed from experience the need to measure this duration, at first in days and nights, and then in clusters of days and nights. Then they can coordinate their observations and notice some cosmic items go through regular existential cycles, first of all, the sun rising or lowering in the sky with shortening or lengthening days and nights. Second, the moon and its phases are numbered as two, four, or three, but systematically waxing and waning. You can easily measure all that in solar days and that is the beginning of time: a human invention quantifying the duration of anything in observable regular elements.
From what we know the Mayas were among the most advanced people for such time-quantification and they developed all sorts of calendars to do this. But they were neither the first one nor the last one. They were not the best either, though they were very good. I will even say that all the lines of dots or check marks or squares or other geometric forms we can find in all the caves in the world in which Hominins and Homo Sapiens lived and that they decorated in many ways are the quantification of various phenomena, though we don’t always know which ones.
This book by Hunbatz Men concentrates on Mayan calendars but in modern language and modern terms, not necessarily in the real Mayan terms at the time, up to 3,000 years ago. It assumes the Mayas were aware of the leap years, though we do not seem to have any real reason to believe so. The author does not work on any serious lunar hypothesis, maybe a calendar. It vaguely mentions but does not explore the Venus cycles as Morning Star and as Evening Star. To work on the Pleiades, why not, yet one question does not concern such a long cycle but the simple working of the ritualistic 260-day Tzolk’in Calendar that is out of sync with the solar calendar, the 365-day Haab Calendar, and even more so if we consider the 360-day Haab Calendar, and how the ritual activities dictated by the Tzolk’in Calendar can be prescribed and predicted and performed when their Tzolk’in dates can fall at any time, in any season in the Haab Calendar. It is hard enough to coordinate the 12-and-a-half moon cycles over a solar calendar, but many civilizations are dealing with it and managing it with cyclical corrections.
That’s why it would have been good to give us some elements on this very same problem with the Tzolk’in calendar when we can compare with the difficult adaptation of the Muslim Lunar ritualistic calendar to the Gregorian calendar. The floating Ramadan is the result of this necessary adaptation. In other words, the present book is slightly short.
To bring together South Africa in the days of apartheid and from the point of view of the white Afrikaners with the tremendous career of Queen with Freddie Mercury and after his death without him shows how ahead of their times this band was when they started as a boys’ band and then when they matured into a full-fledged career.
Apartheid and racism bring segregation and discrimination which systematically reject differences. No future for those who do not have the skin color, the religion, the language, the sexuality, the musical affiliation, even as a simple audience, as the dominant, selected, elected, chosen entity that only has god and science over their heads. And their God has chosen these people to be his chosen people, and these people chosen by God believe what God has explained to them that science justifies their elected-ness, selected-ness or chosen-ness. They are the acme of the creation, and all others are just plain rejects that no one has the heart to destroy.
But be sure God will do it some day. Which god since there are many if not even plenty? Who cares. Each God will recognize his own supporters when they are all dead.
But then you may have no supporters at all, dear God or Gods. It does not really matter. We don’t need these supporters to eat, drink and survive. We have all we need in heaven and the sky. In fact, it was a mistake of ours to have created humanity. The planet would be so much better with none of the human parasites.
Meet the Madman Prophet, who is most the time mixed up with the other God Profit who is universal and derails every so many years, not so many as you may think every ten years or so. But with this God there is always a small population that manages to store away what they need to take over when the crisis has come to an end and the dead victims have been buried or cremated.
An interesting experiment to bring a poetry workshop in a prison For us who have lived in the mythology of Johnny Cash and San Quentin, and all his songs and work about and in prisons there is nothing strange about that But what happens afterward? The inmates get some satisfaction in their work, writing poetry and singing, slam or whatever it may be, but what’s next after their prison term? No reason to reject the experiment but a follow-up action is necessary to know what these men – and it is only men – have become or will become when they get out of the railings, out of the cage. We are not all Johnny Cash, are we?
Since this operation was sponsored by Alliance Française, it would nice to know what kind of follow-up work this Alliance Française is going to perform. The responsibility cannot be the poet’s. But it is interesting to be confirmed one more time that there are many ways for prison inmates to reform. One element is not taken into account. 98% of the population is Sunni Muslims. What is the impact on such an experiment? What does Islam bring to the experiment that would otherwise not be there. Étienne Russias should try to show us this dimension, since, as far as I know, he is a standard young man educated in the Christian traditions, maybe not the religion, but the traditions definitely like being christened, being buried religiously, being married religiously. How did he deal with a 98 percent Muslim group? How many Muslims were taking part, among the inmates and among the workshop workers?
But that’s the beginning of the intelligent globalization we need, a globalization that is founded on differences and not some westernized homogenization.
(No French Translation) The Incas partly inherited and partly developed phenomenal agriculture in the very hard conditions of the Andes: desertic areas, difficult water resources, high altitude, no real draft animal, no wheel, and yet the Andes before and under the Incas produced miraculous results that the Spaniards destroyed in a few years with epidemics and mass killing.
It is easy to say the Incas were barbarians and that covers the genocide, the culturicide, the systematic uprooting and exposing of anything they could have believed or done, based on NO direct contact with them before the “conquest” that must have killed 50% of the population in two or three years with smallpox and other infantile and childhood diseases, plus a few sword killings when there was some resistance.
Unluckily, Gordon McEwan does not really come to a clear vision in his book because he only bases his work on what has been collected by others essentially on the only source of some Spanish colonizers trying to justify the massacre and apocalyptic colonization. The real barbarians were the colonizers, and it is their testimony that is nearly only taken into account. Archaeology is about one century behind what it is in other regions of the world.
Things have slightly changed over the last ten years, but we are still a long way behind what we should have done. That leaves the door open to some like Hunbatz Men pretending the Mayas, Incas and many other Indigenous Native Americans are the descendants of the humanoid people who were established in two continents that have disappeared without leaving any trace of their existence behind them, Mu and Atlantis. And then it is easy to bring in that the inhabitants of these two disappeared continents were extra-humans from some distant civilization who landed on earth and prospered and then found some humanoid animals there and civilized them. We are their descendants, I mean of these extra-humanly civilized humanoid animals from long ago.
Maybe we could simply ask some questions about the origins of the Incas, the Mayas, and many other native American peoples of South and Meso-America. We know the Native Americans of North America and Canada up to Greenland came from Siberia. But that solution is not, feasible for the Native Americans of South and Meso-America. But we are so mentally colonized by North American Protestant Puritans who believe they are the center of the world that research about South America and Mesoamerica has scandalously been neglected. Some mental colonization of this type is also a genocide since it excludes millions of people from what these North American WASPs call the “human race” which is of course white, etc.
ACADEMICALLY NEGLECTED, THE INCAS WERE PRODIGY AGRONOMISTS
POPULAR SUCCESS FOR L’OLIMPIADE
1.
2. JOSEF MYSLIVEČEK – L’OLIMPIADE – BOLOGNA
– OLIVER VON DOHNÁNYI – 1778-2012
This opera has to be considered first in the light of the Century of Enlightenment so deeply marked in
Opera by Mozart. Yet Mysliveček keeps some forms and topics, or treatments of topics in pre-Mozartian
style. He does not reach the modern times of the coming French Revolution and of course of Beaumarchais
and his Figaro. I will start with these elements from the past that are dictated by the subject and at the same
from which the composer takes no real distance.
A father, king what’s more, decides to give his daughter to any man who could win in a fair fight with
another or several other contenders. This is shocking for the second half of the 18th century. Imagine Louis
XVI having a fair tournament fight with some other young king in Europe to win Marie Antoinette. Ridiculous,
but typical of some earlier feudal times, and definitely of Greek antiquity. We all think of Iphigenia who was
sacrificed to the gods for the Greek fleet to be able to go to Troy and destroy it. We know the several
generations of disturbance that this very act caused after the War against Troy.
But It starts with another absolutely shocking fact and this time for the Greeks themselves with the
reference to the Olympic games. The athletes were competing in the nude to reveal everything and hide
nothing, hence, to be absolutely honest. The fact that a feudal lord in feudal Europe – in some context also a
Dame could have her champion – could pick some champion to fight in his name was common, though not
for a woman, though some cases might be found. But in the Olympic reference of the title and in Greece
such a fact, if, what’s more, kept secret, goes against all the rules of sports, fighting, even war. The one who
fights must be declared the champion of the one he fights for. This is not the case here. A rather weak young
man asks his very close friend (we are in Greece don’t forget) to fight and win the daughter of the local king
in his place. If the friend, Megacle, wins against the other contenders, then he gets the prize but not for
himself but for the other, Licida, and with no announcement about this arrangement before the fight. Imagine
the surprise of the daughter after the fight.
In other words, the two young men are cheating against the Olympic system and ethics, and that is
unacceptable. The surprising element is that neither Licida, nor Megacle seem to be conscious that if
Megacle wins – FOR LICIDO – the fight will become at once a fake and will have to be cancelled, and the
two young men would have to face consequences. But Love comes into the picture and makes this nest of
spiders in a cast-iron pot become a big basket full of snakes, and Cleopatra is in our mind.
The woman at stake, the prize of the fight, is Aristea. She is in love with Megacle who is in love with her,
and it is perfectly clear between them that she wants Megacle to win to get him as her husband. She feels
nothing for Licida who is, apart from being Megacle’s friend, a nasty character who was in love with a certain
3. Argene from Crete, like him, who he just rejected to get into the unfair and fraudulent fight at stake here. And
Argene is here disguised as a shepherd to claim the Licida she loves and who loved her, and to expose her
dishonest lover. Imagine the quadrangular situation. Megacle loves Aristea who loves him against Licida who
used to love Argene and had dropped her who still loves him and wants him as her husband, to be able to
claim Aristea who does not love him at all.
But if it were that simple that would be fine and dramatically morbid in many ways. Megacle wins, Licida
claims Aristea, then Megacle tries to kill himself when he realizes, a little bit late, his fraud, but he is saved at
the last minutes, Aristea tries the same but is prevented at the last minutes. Licida just plans on going away
back to Crete. Unluckily Licida’s master and teacher, and think we are in Greece, hence mentor, decides to
tell the local king Clistene about the fraud. Clistene has Licida arrested and condemns him to be sacrificed
on Jupiter’s altar. No recourse comes to any effect with the king who wonders why he feels some strange
and obscure appeal to Licida. The end of the story turns melodramatic and announces the 19th century, after
Goethe’s Faust of course, the first play, in which Grechen is put to death after the birth of her “illegal” child.
But the Faust of the second Faust is pardoned, excused, salvaged like bad goods, saved like a simple
sinner, by a jury of women with Gretchen among them. The good ending only reached after several second
chances given to Faust who is able to redeem himself in the good protestant way, by working for the good of
others, in this case the Dutch since he takes part in the building of the dams, levees and protections they
need to reconquer land on the ocean.
So, what is this redemption? Simple, Doctor Watson. Let’s go back to Greece for a minute and think of
Oedipus. Due to a bad prediction, he was supposed to be exposed to wolves in the mountain but wasn’t,
which leads him to kill his father, marry his mother, have some children from her, and being exposed, and
the drama was consumed in blood. In our case here, Licida was the son Philintus of the local king. His father
had him exposed to the sea for some reason or other that has no value since it is based on superstition. But
the man who was supposed to expose him with a special identifying medal around his neck, did not expose
the baby and gave him to some passer-by, the king of Crete of course, and he became Licida. The medal is
brought to Licida before execution, at his own demand, and Aminta produces it; The local king then
recognizes the medal and finds out Licida is his son Philintus. He had saved Megacle but not Licida. In front
of the new revelation, that he, the local king, was directly responsible for the drama he is confronted to
changes his decisions. He marries Megacle to Aristae, Philintus (who is the brother of Aristea) to Argene,
and thus saves Licida’s life to the profit of Philintus survival or even resurrection from non-existence.
4. This melodramatic ending has led to a way to redeem the horror of feudal practices and ancient Greek
practices into something that is in no way really human, but slightly more humane than the blood-above-all
justice of the previous millennia. The point though is that we hardly find any deeper and ethical reasoning as
we do find in Mozart’s operas. In fact, the end is a way to prevent another Oedipean drama of a brother
marrying his sister against her will because he won her by proxy and designating the proper champion able
to win the lottery fight.
But this is an opera, man, an opera with music and singing. Yessir, Mister, Master, Sir, I am coming to
it, now.
The production we have here is from Bologna where Myslivecek spent some time and created some
works in the very Teatro Communale di Bologna. The producers decided to have a Countertenor, Carlo
Vistoli, for Licida, but to have a soprano, Pervin Chakar, for Megacle, and that is not the best choice they
should have done. Two countertenors in these two parts would have been, first, a lot more “friendly” in the
Greek way, and competitive since the two men are two frauds of ethics, so they have to be treated equally
and both are the main heroes of the opera, hence countertenors today as they probably were castrati in
Napoli, Naples, where the opera was created. The second choice of the producers is ambiguous. The libretto
we assume is complete in the booklet but important sections in the recitatives are cut off (not in the booklet
but in the production and recording) and that is not fair with the opera. Sure enough, Mysliveček is known for
his long recitatives that cut off the arias to a shorter proportion in the full opera, but cutting at times hundreds
of words is not the solution to make the opera more dynamic.
On the other hand, the arias, the few duets, the few choruses are musically creative and very well
performed. That’s probably why I say that the longish recitatives could have been improved by arranging
some improvised arias or duets from the text the way it is or nearly so, but with some arrangement in the
baroque line, to remain in the 18th century, or in a more courageous way in some modern, or more modern
chorals or spirituals in the America way, or in some more European way, getting some inspiration from local
folkloric modern productions, or some modern composer who is using the opera stage creatively like Pascal
Dusapin, and his Uomo di Fuma, Perela, or his Faustus, the Last Night. I regret the cuts tremendously and I
regret even more that no upgrading was attempted, just cut off what we find too long. You could have done
better.
5. This being said the arias are absolutely, at times, sublime and they could have also been lengthened
slightly with some arrangements; As far as I know Mysliveček is in the public domain and between sticking to
the original and betraying it completely into something that has little to do with anything from the 18th century,
becoming something out of time, there are many possibilities. If we want the opera to become popular again,
first we have to bring it to the public and not expect the public to come to the very few opera houses in the
world worth going, and we have to speak a musical language the new audience could understand. Latin has
been abandoned from the Catholic church for long enough for us to start thinking that some radical changes
are necessary if we do not want some iconoclastic rebellious but superficial minds to take over the world in
the most populist way.
A beautiful enterprise to bring this composer out of the closet where he had been locked up for too long.
But please do not satisfy yourself with warming it up for five minutes in some microwave cultural oven.
Instead think for the 21st century and our audience. But do spend some time on this excavating detour: it is
no archaeology. It is discovery and it could become tomorrow reinvention. That’s just the difference between
resurrection and salvaging.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
VERSION FRANÇAISE
Cet opéra doit d'abord être considéré à la lumière du Siècle des Lumières si profondément marqué
dans l'opéra par Mozart. Pourtant, Mysliveček conserve certaines formes et sujets, ou traitements de sujets,
dans le style pré-mozartien. Il n'atteint pas les temps modernes de la Révolution Française à venir et bien
sûr de Beaumarchais et de son Figaro (1778, même année que l’opéra en question). Je partirai de ces
éléments du passé qui sont dictés par le sujet et en même temps desquels le compositeur ne prend pas
vraiment de distance.
6. Un père, roi qui plus est, décide de donner sa fille à tout homme qui pourra gagner dans un combat
loyal avec un ou plusieurs autres prétendants. C'est choquant pour la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle.
Imaginez Louis XVI se battant dans un tournoi équitable avec un autre jeune roi d'Europe pour gagner
Marie-Antoinette. Ridicule, mais typique de certaines époques féodales antérieures, et certainement de
l'antiquité grecque. Nous pensons tous à Iphigénie qui fut sacrifiée aux dieux pour que la flotte grecque
puisse se rendre à Troie et la détruire. Nous connaissons les perturbations que cet acte même a provoquées
sur plusieurs générations après la guerre contre Troie.
Mais cela commence par un autre fait absolument choquant et cette fois pour les Grecs eux-mêmes
avec la référence aux Jeux Olympiques. Les athlètes concouraient nus pour tout révéler et ne rien cacher,
donc pour être absolument honnête. Le fait qu'un seigneur féodal dans l'Europe féodale – dans certains
contextes, une Dame pouvait également avoir son champion – pouvait choisir un champion pour combattre
en son nom était courant, mais pas pour gagner une femme, bien que certains cas puissent être rencontrés.
Mais dans la référence olympique du titre et en Grèce, un tel fait, même s’il est gardé secret, va à l’encontre
de toutes les règles du sport, du combat, voire de la guerre. Celui qui combat doit être déclaré champion de
celui pour qui il combat. Ce n'est pas le cas ici. Un jeune homme plutôt faible demande à son ami très
proche (nous sommes en Grèce ne l’oublions pas) de se battre et de gagner à sa place la fille du roi local. Si
l'ami Mégacle gagne contre les autres prétendants, alors il remporte le prix, mais pas pour lui-même, mais
pour l'autre, Licida, et sans aucune annonce de cet arrangement avant le combat. Imaginez la surprise de la
fille après le combat.
Autrement dit, les deux jeunes hommes trichent contre le système olympique et l’éthique, et c’est
inacceptable. L'élément surprenant est que ni Licida, ni Mégacle ne semblent conscients que si Megacle
gagne – POUR LICIDA – le combat deviendra immédiatement un faux et devra être annulé, et les deux
jeunes hommes devront en subir les conséquences. Mais l'Amour entre en scène et fait de ce nid
d'araignées dans une marlite en fonte un grand panier rempli de serpents, et Cléopâtre est dans notre esprit.
La femme en jeu, le prix du combat, est Aristée. Elle est amoureuse de Mégacle qui est amoureux d'elle
et il est parfaitement clair entre eux qu'elle veut que Mégacle gagne pour l'avoir comme mari. Elle ne ressent
rien pour Licida qui est, en plus d'être l'amie de Mégacle, un méchant personnage amoureux, comme lui,
d'une certaine Argene de Crète, qu'il vient de rejeter pour se lancer dans le combat injuste et frauduleux qui
se joue ici. Et Argene est ici déguisée en berger pour réclamer le Licida qu'elle aime et qui l'aimait, et
dénoncer son amant malhonnête. Imaginez la situation quadrangulaire. Mégacle aime Aristea qui l'aime
contre Licida qui aimait Argene et qu’il a abandonnée bien qu’elle l'aime toujours et le veuille comme mari,
pour pouvoir revendiquer Aristea qui ne l'aime pas du tout.
Mais si c’était aussi simple, ce serait bien et dramatiquement morbide à bien des égards. Mégacle
gagne, Licida réclame Aristea, puis Mégacle tente de se suicider lorsqu'il se rend compte, un peu tard, de sa
fraude, mais il est sauvé à une minute près, Aristea tente de même mais est empêchée à la dernière minute
avant la fin funeste. Licida envisage juste de retourner en Crète. Malheureusement, le maître et professeur
7. de Licida, et pensons-bien que nous sommes en Grèce, donc le mentor de Licida, décide de parler de la
fraude au roi local Clistène. Clistène fait arrêter Licida et le condamne à être sacrifié sur l'autel de Jupiter.
Aucun recours n'aboutit auprès du roi qui se demande pourquoi il éprouve un attrait étrange et obscur
envers Licida. La fin du récit devient mélodramatique et annonce le XIXe siècle, après le Faust de Goethe
bien sûr, la première pièce, dans laquelle Gretchen est mise à mort après la naissance de son enfant
« illégal ». Mais le Faust du deuxième Faust est pardonné, excusé, récupéré comme une mauvaise
marchandise ou légume, sauvé comme un simple pécheur, par un jury de femmes parmi lesquelles
Gretchen. La bonne fin n'est atteinte qu'après plusieurs secondes chances données à Faust qui parvient à
se racheter de la bonne manière protestante, en travaillant pour le bien des autres, en l'occurrence des
Hollandais puisqu'il participe à la construction des barrages, des digues et protections dont ils ont besoin
pour reconquérir les terres océaniques.
Alors, quelle est cette rédemption ? C'est simple, docteur Watson. Revenons un instant à la Grèce et
pensons à Œdipe. En raison d'une mauvaise prédiction, il était censé être exposé aux loups dans la
montagne mais ne l'a pas été, ce qui l'a amené à tuer son père, à épouser sa mère, à avoir des enfants
d'elle, et à être dénoncé, et le drame s'est consommé dans le sang. Dans notre cas ici, Licida était le fils
Philintus du roi local. Son père l'a fait exposer à la mer pour une raison ou une autre qui n'a aucune valeur
puisqu'elle est basée sur la superstition. Mais l'homme qui était censé l'exposer avec une médaille
d'identification spéciale autour du cou, n'a pas exposé le bébé et l'a donné à un passant, le roi de Crète bien
sûr qui se promenait le long de la plage, et il est devenu Licida. La médaille est apportée à Licida avant
l'exécution, à sa propre demande, et Aminta la produit. Le roi local reconnaît alors la médaille et découvre
que Licida est son fils Philintus. Il avait sauvé Mégacle mais pas Licida. Devant la nouvelle révélation que lui,
le roi local, était directement responsable du drame auquel il est confronté, il change ses décisions. Il marie
Mégacle avec Aristea, Philintus (qui est le frère d'Aristea) avec Argene, et sauve ainsi la vie de Licida au
profit de la survie de Philintus ou même de sa résurrection de la non-existence.
Cette fin mélodramatique a conduit à une manière de racheter l’horreur des pratiques féodales et des
pratiques grecques antiques par quelque chose qui n’est en aucun cas vraiment humain, mais légèrement
plus humain que la justice sanglante avant tout des millénaires précédents. Le fait est que nous ne trouvons
guère de raisonnement plus profond et éthique dans cet opéra comme ce que l’on trouve dans les opéras de
Mozart. En fait, la fin est un moyen d'éviter un autre drame œdipien où un frère épouserait sa sœur contre
sa volonté parce qu'il l'a gagnée par procuration en désignant le champion approprié capable de gagner la
loterie de ce combat absurde
Mais c’est un opéra, Monsieur, sinon Docteur, un opéra avec de la musique et du chant. Oui, Monsieur,
Maître, Patron, Monseigneur, j'y viens tout de suite.
La production que nous avons ici vient de Bologne où Mysliveček a passé du temps et a créé quelques
œuvres au même Teatro Communale di Bologna. Les producteurs ont décidé d'avoir un contre-ténor, Carlo
Vistoli, pour Licida, mais d'avoir une soprano, Pervin Chakar, pour Mégacle, et ce n'est pas le meilleur choix
8. qu'ils auraient dû faire. Deux contre-ténors dans ces deux rôles auraient été, d'abord, beaucoup plus
« amicaux » à la grecque, et compétitifs puisque les deux hommes sont deux escrocs à l'éthique limitée, ils
doivent donc être traités sur un pied d'égalité et tous deux sont les héros principaux de l’opéra, donc deux
contre-ténors aujourd'hui car ils étaient probablement des castrats à Naples où l'opéra a été créé. Le
deuxième choix des producteurs est ambigu. Le livret que nous supposons être complet dans la brochure de
l’enregistrement, mais des sections importantes des récitatifs sont coupées (pas dans le livret mais dans la
production et l'enregistrement) et ce n'est pas honnête avec l'opéra. Effectivement, Mysliveček est connu
pour ses longs récitatifs qui réduisent les arias en proportion dans l'opéra complet, mais couper parfois des
centaines de mots n'est pas la solution pour rendre l'opéra plus dynamique.
En revanche, les airs, les quelques duos, les quelques chœurs sont musicalement créatifs et très bien
interprétés. C'est sans doute pour cela que je dis que les récitatifs assez longs auraient pu être améliorés en
arrangeant quelques airs ou duos « improvisés » à partir du texte tel qu'il est ou presque, mais avec un
certain agencement dans le sens du baroque, pour rester dans le XVIIIe siècle, ou. d'une manière plus
courageuse avec quelques cantiques ou spirituals plus modernes à la manière américaine, ou d'un genre
plus européen, en s'inspirant des productions folkloriques modernes locales, ou d'un compositeur moderne
qui utilise la scène de l'opéra de manière créative comme Pascal Dusapin, et son Uomo di Fuma, Perela, ou
son Faustus, The Last Night. Je regrette énormément les coupes et je regrette encore plus qu'aucune mise
à niveau n'ait été tentée, juste couper ce que l'on trouve trop long. Vous eussiez pu mieux faire.
Ceci étant dit les arias sont absolument, parfois, sublimes et ils auraient pu aussi être légèrement
allongés avec quelques arrangements. Pour autant que je sache, Mysliveček est dans le domaine public et
entre s'en tenir à l'original et le trahir complètement en quelque chose qui n'a rien à voir avec quoi que ce
soit du XVIIIe siècle, devenant quelque chose hors du temps, il existe de nombreuses possibilités. Si nous
voulons que l'opéra redevienne populaire, nous devons d'abord le présenter au public et ne pas attendre du
public qu'il vienne dans les très rares salles d'opéra au monde qui en valent la peine, et nous devons parler
un langage musical que le nouveau public pourrait connaître, comprendre. Le latin a été abandonné par
l’Église catholique depuis suffisamment longtemps pour que nous commencions à penser que des
changements radicaux sont nécessaires si nous ne voulons pas que des esprits iconoclastes insoumis mais
superficiels prennent le contrôle du monde de la manière la plus populiste qui soit.
Une belle entreprise pour sortir ce compositeur du placard où il est resté trop longtemps enfermé. Mais
ne vous contentez pas de le réchauffer pendant cinq minutes dans un four à micro-ondes culturelles. Pensez
plutôt au 21ème siècle et à notre public. Mais accordons-nous un peu de temps à ce détour de recherche. Ce
9. n’est pas de l’archéologie. C'est une aventure de découverte et cela pourrait devenir demain une
réinvention. C’est juste là la différence entre résurrection et récupération.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU