direction artistique karine lethiec [ PRESENTATION FILE ] THE FOUR-LEGGED RAVEN by Kryštof Mařatka Melodramatic farce for two actors and instrumental ensemble on texts by Daniil Harms performed by the CALLIOPÉE ENSEMBLE Karine Lethiec, artistic leader 2 [ PRESENTATION FILE ] The four legged raven © Didier Bertrand © Didier THE FOUR-LEGGED RAVEN by Kryštof Mařatka Melodramatic farce for two actors and instrumental ensemble on texts by Daniil Harms direction artistique karine lethiec Instrumentation: 2 actors, conductor, oboe, clarinet, horn, accordion, piano, 2 percussionists, viola and double bass Length: 1h15 min with Kryštof Mařatka, composer and conductor Alain Carré and Vincent Figuri, actors and the Calliopée Ensemble, artistic leader Karine Lethiec David Walter, oboe Chen Halevi, clarinet Vladimir Dubois, horn Karine Lethiec, viola Laurène Durantel, double bass Renaud Muzzolini and Nicolas Gerbier, percussions Aude Guiliano, accordion Frédéric Lagarde, piano The cast may have to be altered Commissioned by the Présences Festival / Radio France 2007 World Premiere February 18th, 2007, Maison de Radio France Czech Premiere March 26th, 2007, Prague Philharmonic Radio Broadcast February 8th, 2007, France Musique Publisher Éditions Jobert - Paris French text Subtitles available in German, English or Czech Video extract of The Four-Legged Raven in the TV documentary “A Portrait of Kryštof Mařatka” produced and broadcasted by the Mezzo Channel in September 2007. WATCH A VIDEO EXTRACT: http://krystofmaratka.com/fr/oeuvres/le-corbeau-a-quatre-pattes/ “Kryštof Mařatka, who has spent his teenage years during the Czechoslovak dictatorship’s final years, prior to the Velvet Revolution, has freed himself from all the rage accumulated there through a beneficial psychodrama. The two actors, Alain Carré and Vincent Figuri, perfect in their double monologue – rather than dialogue – excel in expressionist mockery against a sumptuous richness of invention in the quite dense instrumental formation, in this case the excellent Calliopée Ensemble directed with fieriness and vital tonicity by the composer himself. This cheerful, terrifying and farcical Raven has inscited a very enthusiastic audience to applaud vigorously.” Harry Halbreich – Crescendo, February 18th, 2007 [ PRESENTATION FILE ] The four legged raven 3 THE WORK The Four-Legged Raven presents itself as a concert piece enriched by several theatrical elements: gesticulation, facial expressions, occasional changes of spots for the two actors, as well as vocal interventions from the musicians who punctuate, sing, murmur, whisper, or make music with various objects such as pebbles, children’s toys, hunting lures etc. Despite these scenic principles, the melodrama wishes to remain faithful to the idea of a concert piece: no staging, no decor, no special light, no costumes. The narrative predominates and confers its rhythm to the music, so much so that the subject matter, its often absurd nature, are not only reflected in the musical parts, but invade the very interpretation of the music. The melodrama form has always posed a problem of balance between spoken the text and the music. Composers often “sacrifice” the sonic transparency of the lyrics by favouring their “colour” and their “rhythm”, while their meaning is being dispersed in the sound whose volume is much too high. The musical writing and the spoken word diction in The Four-Legged Raven want to preserve the greatest possible audibility of the lyrics whose rhythm and intensity then dictate the character and the importance of the musical sequences. A discrete amplification of the spoken voices is also set up in the hall (headset, speakers, etc.). The melodrama is composed of a sequence of short stories accompanied by a musical discourse which works as if it were another plane of literary content. To remain faithful to Harms’ work, throughout his melodrama, Kryštof Mařatka favours a narrative dimension, in the work’s form as well as in the mu- sical writing. The order chosen by the composer is not trying to connect the stories one to the other, on the contrary, it aims to create a contrasting musical and dramatic fabric a bit like a kaleidoscope of sketches and crazy situations. Once upon a time there was a redhead man with no eyes nor ears. He did not have any hair either and it was by convention that he was called a redhead. He could not speak because he had no mouth. He had no nose either. He did not even have arms or legs. He had no belly either, no back, nor backbone, neither had he any bowels. He had nothing at all! So that we are wondering who is it that we are talking about. It is therefore preferable not to add anything on the matter. Daniil HARMS - blue notebook n° 10 4 [ PRESENTATION FILE ] The four legged raven © Ensemble Calliopée © Ensemble [ PRESENTATION FILE ] The four legged raven 5 The four [ PRESENTATION FILE ] The four legged raven 6 legged raven [ PRESENTATION FILE ] The four legged raven 7 THE AUTHOR - DANIIL HARMS (1905-1942) by Jean-Philippe Jaccard When at the beginning of the World War II, Daniil HARMS (1905-1942) and most of his friends were mown down by the repression, a whole literary generation was decimated: the one which did not have the time to get published before it was si- lenced by triumphant Stalinism. Heir to the avant-gardes of the 1910s, co-founder of the last “leftist” literary organization in Soviet Russia, the Union of Real Art (OBE- RIU), then turned, like so many others, into a “class enemy” in the 1930s, Harms is among the many writers whose works have remained in drawers for long decades. At first poet, he gradually converted to prose. Master of the short form, Harms had become the horrified observer of the monstrous reality that surrounded him, in miniatures often funny, always tragic. This reality, dominated by the stupidity and violence of a “human flock”, he was to suffer it himself, and his diary, a unique do- cument in its genre, is a good echo of that. Like his predecessors, Harms saw reason as an instrument that divides reality into pieces. However, reality isn’t immobile and circumscribable, and dividing it can only be arbitrary. The same is true of poetic representation: words are conventions that only participate in the arbitrary and can in no way reflect the real world. Prose of the 1930s was invaded by everyday life, a horrible daily life that forever drew mankind to its lowest: promiscuity in community apartments where many families pile up, dirt and stench of the buildings’ cour- tyards, aggressivity of a human “herd” supported by the police and the janitor snitches, weakness of the individuals, disappearances and arbitrary arrests, mutilated bodies, sudden diseases, etc. Such was this “primary reality” which then appeared only as an accumulation of small pieces of reality unrelated to each other. This is the main characteristic of Harms’ heroes, thrown into a world overtaken by such arbitrariness that anything can happen there, a world which they do not understand because it is too big for them. Beaten, repulsed, deceived, obsessed by an awful dream, insomniac, entangled in objects and helpless in front of a reality that only seeks to destroy them, they have their ancestors in Russian literature: whether one thinks of Akaky Akakievich in The Overcoat or of Poprishchin in Diary of a Madman, by Gogol, or of all those “humiliated and offended” who populate Dostoyevsky’s work. But above all, they are brothers of Camus’s Meursault (The Stranger), guillotined, of Kafka’s Mr. K. (The Trial), stabbed in a quarry, of Becket’s Molloy (Molloy), locked up in an asylum, of Nabokov’s Cincinnatus C. (Invitation to a Beheading), who is awaiting his condemnation, or of Ionesco’s Berenger (Rhinoceros), besieged at his home. The theme of the arrest, already present in 1927 in Harms’ play Elizaveta Bam and that one can trace in his work up to the end – that is up to a period when the writer himself was undergoing the fate of his heroes – is in fact only the last stage of the frightening relationship that the “rhinocerized” world has with man. This relationship is not only the result of hostile external forces (a repressive power, for example), it is ine- vitable. The only hope is that a miracle will happen, because, as Harms writes it in his diary in 1939, only a miracle can destroy “the physical structure of the world”. This is the theme of a short story written that same year, 1939, The Old Woman, whose story is reminiscent of Ionesco’s Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It. Changing the physical structure of the world would be to beat death, symbolized by the old woman which the narrator seeks to get rid of as he is trying to write the story of a miracle worker who performs no miracle. The miracle, which is therefore also the act of writing, will indeed not take place: the only change in “physi- cal structure” that occurs is the decomposition of the old woman’s corpse. The individual is crushed by the mortifying reality which surrounds him and of the God whom he addresses his prayers to, only a large green caterpillar remains, squirming on the ground. If the absurd is a fundamental element of Harms’ work, it is important to go beyond and to note that this fracture is being realized within the act of writing itself. The text, just as Harms’ heroes, manages barely to exist. At any given moment, it is under the threat of disappearing: either a character leaves the narrative, taking with him what could have been said about him had he remained, either the character does not even exist, either he dies the minute he has been introduced, either the narrator admits not knowing anything about him, or he is tired of writing, or worse, the inkwell disappears, depriving the writer of the very material used for writing.