|
"Shell Shock" debuted at La Monnaie opera house in Brussels
on Friday, with eight further performances in the coming days,
all but one of them sold out.
It depicts neither great battles nor heroism - instead it
focuses on the traumatic effects war has on individuals.
Cave's libretto is organized into 12 songs, or cantos, each
focusing on one participant in the war. It is also littered with
expletives.
Best known for his time as lead singer of alternative rock band
Bad Seeds, Cave said he struggled with the subject matter and
the problem of expressing the feelings of soldiers at war.
"What do I know about killing a man or seeing a friend die,"
Cave wrote in the program notes. "At the end it was a battle
between me, the keyboard and my imagination."
At the opera's start, the auditorium is plunged into darkness
only to be awakened by the wailing of the choir as the curtain
pulls up and a war cemetery appears under faint light.
The individual scenes are interspersed by modern dance routines
by Belgian company Eastman, the dancers at times joining to form
a heroic statue and at other times convulsing on the floor of an
infirmary.
Lens's music is not always melodic but uses the orchestra to
paint the scenes, such as light wind instruments accompanying
the lamentation of an abandoned orphan in the final scene.
It takes a surreal turn in the dramatic canto of the Angels of
Death with high-pitched voices shrieking "I am the angel of
death, I catch breath", followed by repeated expletives.
The deserter's canto begins: "My mother's in the laundry crying
from the shame. My father would have preferred I took a bullet
in the brain."
Perhaps most striking words are those of a survivor, who, back
with his family, cannot shake the horrifying memories of battle.
"Sometimes I think my wife wished I'd died," he sings.
Belgium was the scene of some of the heaviest battles between
the Germans and British, French and allied forces entrenched in
the west of the country and northern France.
Some 65 million soldiers mobilized between 1914 and 1918, of
whom about 9 million were killed and 20 million wounded on both
sides on all fronts. Civilian deaths are estimated at about 7
million.
(Editing by Philip Blenkinsop and Angus MacSwan)
[© 2014 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2014 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
|
'Shell
Shock' opera brings trauma of World War One to stage
