The Navigator

The ELISION Navigator ensemble „The Navigator is an opera about extreme passion, about Eros and Thanatos, Desire some of the disorientations of ecstasy – and Death, the hazard of lovers, and of war and choices made between annihilation and the special kind of mad aliveness when creation. all the senses are sharpened and one can The subject of The Navigator is the erotic paradox – or perhaps more precisely, access states of transformation. The opera the structure of the paradox that is theatricalised in Eros – the name the Ancient Greeks is not about narrative form or psychological gave to the divinity of desire. The Greeks described Eros as the ‘weaver of fictions’, ‘the development – instead it describes a series of bittersweet’, pointing to the ambivalence, the dilemma of sensation and the illusory states of being. conditions that underpin the erotic. The journey then is not so much a linear journey from Aspects of two great epics, The one place to another, but more a to-and-fro; a place of deferral. What is desire but a Mahabharata and Wagner‘s Tristan und longing for that which is out of reach – a trajectory of longing that moves endlessly to an Isolde, are symbolically pivotal to the ope- impossible vanishing point? A triangular geometry is created in which the lover yearns to ra. It is not the stories themselves that are be one with the beloved, yet also strives to maintain the distance that is the condition of important, rather certain energy patterns The Navigator The Navigator The the erotic (think of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Stendhal’s On of risk and transformation. The idea of the 70 71 Love, Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, Sappho’s poetry). gamble comes from the dice game scene in OW OW The opera’s journey plots the co-ordinates of desire – a staging of shifting posi- the great Indian epic The Mahabharata. tions: of distance and nearness in musical space; convergence and divergence of different Briefly, King Yudishtira is drawn into a dice temporal forms. The figures in my opera, the characters of the Navigator, the Beloved, game where he stakes all that he owns, in- the Fool, the Crone and the Angel of History, move in shifting constellations to describe cluding his kingdom, his brothers, himself and his wife. Because of his unstoppable Music Theatre N Theatre Music Music Theatre N Theatre Music addiction, he gambles and loses every- thing, including that which is most loved. The opera begins at this catastrophic moment of total loss. So the gamble is about an extremity of desire which might lead towards ecstasy (lovers) or perhaps towards disaster or annihilation (war). – Liza Lim Interview with Jérémie Szpirglas (6 June 2009) Music The prelude to this ‘alchemical dream „Cicadas were an image of desire for the opera’ is played by a Ganassi recorder, Greeks – they had a story that once upon an instrument long associated with a time, the cicadas were human. When lamentation, the erotic, and pastoral and the Muses arose, they were so enamoured supernatural realms. A counterpoint is of music that all they wanted to do was provided by the sound of cicadas: a high sing and forgot all else, perishing in this pitch of desire and the rustle of the qui- suffused state of desire. vering feathers of an entrapped Angel The recorder is another image of History. of this trope of desire. The Ganassi flouris- hed in 15th Century Venice in a school of recorder playing that was highly virtuosic and full of extravagant ornamentations. As an instrument, it was associated with the supernatural, the melancholic, the pastoral and the erotic. That particular About tradition died out when Baroque recorders came to supremacy but strangely, it was an Australian instrument builder, Fred Morgan, who spearheaded the revival of „In late 2004, I sat alone in the darkened more with certain abstract patterns that the instrument about forty years ago. So concert hall of the Sydney Opera House are expressed in these great classic stories its use for me is also tied up with strange listening to the Sydney Symphony under without necessarily ‘setting’ the story. pathways in recapturing and remaking the The Navigator The Navigator The Gianluigi Gelmetti play the rapturous Myths are incredible storehouses of deep past - it is both ‚authentic‘ and recreated 72 73 music of the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde. cultural knowledge so I find them endlessly – a product of research and imagination. I OW OW From that moment, I wanted to write an fascinating, relevant and alive.“ love the expressivity of the Ganassi recor- opera about ecstatic engulfment and the der - the immediacy that the sound has, ambiguous space of desire. I avidly follo- – Liza Lim with its closeness to breath - it registers wed performances of Wagner’s opera – in Interview with Jérémie Szpirglas every subtle shift and nuance in the body. Brisbane, in Paris and in Essen. From there These various kinds of instru- Music Theatre N Theatre Music Music Theatre N Theatre Music The Navigator began to evolve.“ ments emerging from different historical Liza Lim periods, for me, create different musical „One of themes that I was really drawn (born 1966, Australia) spaces – sometimes very congruent, some- to in the Tristan und Isolde story – which times clashing. Each instrument comes out is perhaps not the first theme one usually Liza Lim‘s work as a composer is focused of particular sound worlds – each with its thinks of – is the theme of the chaos of fal- on intercultural exchange, looking par- own performance histories, different phy- se signs: in an early Breton version of the ticularly at Chinese and Australian Indi- sicalities and aesthetics of listening and story, Tristan is waiting: does Isolde’s ship genous art, aesthetics and ritual culture. expression and somehow the mix provides fly the white flag of good news or the black Her projects encompass opera, chamber me with access to a highly textured mix of flag of disaster? Tristan hears the report of & symphonic music and site-specific gestural languages and ‘affects’ (to draw a black flag and dies just as Isolde arrives. installation. Recent commissions include upon a very Baroque understanding of Are we actually that reliable witnesses to Ensemble musikFabrik & Holland Festival, music). Instead of a smooth and histori- our own desires or do our projections cast Los Angeles Philharmonic, Ensemble cally coherent ensemble, you end up with a veil on whatever we experience? Ouch! InterContemporain, Salzburg & Lucerne a lot of ‘boundary situations’ – the electric Festivals, Bavarian Radio & SWR Or- guitar against the recorder is one extreme […] chestras, Sydney Symphony and Festival example. I like to work with these polari- d’Automne à Paris. She has been closely ties, finding ways of weaving connections I wasn’t thinking of Aboriginal myths but associated with the ELISION Ensemble across boundaries or intensifying the diffe- the librettist Patricia Sykes, interestingly, with whom she collaborated on three rences and the friction between elements read very widely on myths surrounding the operas. She is Professor of Composition which then forms part of the expressivity Greek Plaiedes, the constellation which at the University of Huddersfield, UK. of my musical language.“ also figures very prominently in Australian Aboriginal stories about the Seven Sisters, Her music is published by Ricordi (Milan, – Liza Lim www.elision.org.au But I think you can see that I am working London & Munich). Interview with Jérémie Szpirglas .

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