Identity is something that every performer must face. Every time we take the stage to deliver a text, be it literature or music or a combination of both, we have to make a decision about the character of that text and our stance on it. How can we materialize it? Do we inherit the identity of the matter we imbibe, or does it reconstitute itself while being shaped to our own identity? What are our obligations to the text? to the audience? to ourselves?
In my book Song and Self, I explore and worry about identity issues, such as gender issues, that come to the fore in my favorite work. Is the real protagonist of Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe and Leben not the woman we see on the surface, but rather the composer, whose anxieties and passions influence the cycle in every way? ? What difference would it make if this cycle was sung by a man, as it was in the 19th century?
Again, how important is the Mad Woman’s gender in my song “Curlew River”? Britten draws on the ritual resources of the Japanese Noh theater to create a sense of distance. Cross-gender casting is part of it, but blurring our perceptions of gender only amplifies the impact of rigidly told narratives. “Mad women are all of us”.
As I discovered in my study of Ravel’s Madokas Chanson, thorny political issues can also intersect with the sung figures. The second section of this powerful cycle, by a vocal and instrumental trio, is set in his 18th-century protests against the long-standing French attempts to colonize Madagascar, where the Malagasy I am in charge of “Méfiez-vous des blancs” (“Watch out for the white man”), he cries, written by Evaristo Parny, an anti-slavery slave owner.
Ravel wrote the song in the midst of the French colonial wars in North Africa, just decades after the bloody French conquest of Madagascar in 1896. Some early audiences saw the song as a political provocation. There is something disturbing about these two acts of ventriloquist, Parney’s poetry and Ravel’s music. In addressing this piece, we must question the poet’s malice as an abolitionist, the composer’s motives, and our own motives. Who should sing this song? Who owns it?
“Song and Self” is a very exploratory work. I literally take the concept of an essay as an attempt, an experiment. If I had to draw any conclusions, the way to approach classical music, in an age where the relevance and ideological positions of classical music are constantly being questioned, is not to abandon it, but to explore its origins more deeply. It is to do. The question is embedded in the classical music tradition. And interpreting this complex music we’ve inherited means negotiating between past and present obsessions, allowing us to discover more about ourselves.
