DOMINO
Die Verwandlung der Thérèse
„Ein Bett als Grab und darin einen Leichnam, der von seinem Tod nichts weiß, lebend faulend und ich mit ihm.“ ("A bed for a grave and in it a corpse that knows nothing of its death, rotting alive and I with it."Sancia Fischbein). This is how Thérèse describes her marital bed.However, the escape from this putrid cot does not become a victorious self-empowerment for Thérèse. It inevitably leads the protagonist into an even deeper hell with her lover. A hell of mutual destruction.
Thérèse came from Algeria as an inglorious "souvenir". In provincial France she becomes the ward of Madame Raquin, who soon enlists the girl as a nurse for her consumptive son Camille, and eventually as his bride. From the beginning, Thérèse is disgusted by sharing a sweaty bed with the sickly man. At the first opportunity, she begins an affair with a friend of her husband.
Zola writes: "The woman tough and mendacious, the man full-blooded and dull-witted, in this way they formed a powerfully united pair." To be able to live out their lust, they see themselves compelled to drown Camille in the Seine on a boat trip. The lovers cannot be proven guilty by the police. They believed that nothing would stand in the way of their happiness except for the abysses of their own psyche, which almost drive them to murder again in the end.
Wulfin Lieske has transformed the material into an oppressively ferocious composition. Different leading instruments are assigned to the individual characters. Madam Raquin: bass clarinet, Camille: piccolo trumpet, Thérèse: English horn, Laurent: bass trombone. In addition, the Domino Society structures the action like a choral parody from an ancient tragedy. In his first opera, Lieske shows himself to be a bold stylist who, while composing atonally and partly aleatorically at the core, he does not shy away from quotations from jazz, from the Maghreb or from (Viennese) classical music. The score comes across as brusque, even edgy, and even when the feeling of love awakens in Thérèse for the first time, it sounds like a musical quotation of love that is swallowed again and again by depraved desires and frequencies.
The initial impetus for the adaptation of Zola's novel came from Stephen Ibbotson. He conceived the scenario and integrated the textual level of the criminal profiler. The libretto is by the writer Sancia Fischbein, who always explores the colour and rhythm of language in poetry slams and spoken word performances. Her libretto exposes the pulp fiction core of Émile Zola in an opera-atypical narrative style. The vulgarity of the trashy novel comes to light, the blandness of the penny dreadful, the whole festering milieu of the Parisian bourgeoisie or, as the critics once wrote: the "smut" of Zola's novel. Zola did not seek exaggeration through narrative distance. He took the material as a found object from the street. Just as the case appeared in the Parisian gazettes: as a lurid article about an abysmal love murder on the Seine.
The title Domino points to the paradox of the material. For just as in the Domino effect, each action follows stringently from the previous one. The murder is just as inevitable as the marriage before it and the mutual disintegration at the end. On the other hand, the domino society is the static part of the opera. That small group of gamblers that meets weekly at the Raquin´s house comments on the latest gossip from Paris in an endless repeating loop. They comment on the absence of their murdered host with the same regret with which they would describe a dropped stone. They get excited, they get angry. But they never act. In this way the domino effect becomes a constant of life. It is the corset that gives everyone support. This is because, as they say, the game must go on.
From the gutter to the opera
A newspaper report about Thérèse Raquin, who kills her sickly husband together with her lover, forms the basis for a controversial novel by Emilé Zola. Instead of distancing himself morally from the deed, Zola describes the events like a scientist describes his experimental set-up in the laboratory. Without empathy, without sympathy, but with an analytical view of the peculiar biotope and the peculiarities of his object of investigation. On publication (1867), Zola was accused of writing "pornographic" literature. Years later, literary scholars recognised in Thérèse Raquin the birth of naturalism. Unlike Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Thérèse Raquin does not offer a truly feminist reading for Thérèse merely exchanges one marital hell for another.
Wulfin Lieske and librettist Sancia Fischbein found the deterministic view of the world in the material tantalisingly out of step with the times. For, similar to the title-giving domino, one stone falls after the other. The characters are not acting in the sense that they weigh decisions and make moral judgements. They are puppets of their instincts, their banal greed, their Darwinian will to survive on the underbelly of the French bourgeoisie.
Musically, Lieske mirrors this deterministic image of man in a score of peculiar symmetry. All elements of the opera are arranged in mirror symmetry to the murder, which forms the centre of the score. As if the murder of love were creating the mirror axis to this Rorschach test, which shows only misery to the right and left of the deed. Even if this circumstance is difficult to perceive acoustically, it reveals on a meta-level the compulsiveness in which the characters are connected - indeed, chained - to each other.
Sancia Fischbein has set an explosive text into this rigid corset that oscillates between disgust, force, sexual arousement, greed and guilt. Against the backdrop of a linguistic wallpaper of statements by the so-called domino society, which almost continuously utters commonplaces, platitudes and agitations, she creates a Thérèse who is not radiant - but immensely fascinating. A Thérèse who is "good-naturedly" humiliated until her pride is broken. A Thérèse who finally wants to see her salvation in a crude and smug farmer's son. A Thérèse who throws herself into lust and adventure and who, in a Bonny and Clyde moment, believes that murder can weld her to happiness forever. A Thérése who finally gets into a spiral of rejection, guilt and violence with her supposed saviour - until, as ultima ratio, another murder is supposed to bring her redemption.
The epic was written at a time of great change. Patriarchal social structures were replacing matriarchal ones in the establishment of communities in larger municipalities. In hindsight, many of these patriarchal organization forms were accompanied with aspects which caused, and are still causing, social inequality, strife and exploitation.
Our world and the individual societies within it are also in a state of considerable upheaval. Just like Gilgamesh we appear to have come literally to the end of the world through our desire to dominate nature. Consequently, we are now confronted with the spectre of the possibility of global extinction, be it through global warming, overuse of natural resources or by a global nuclear war. Our unshakeable belief in only the positive aspects of technological progress has often brought us in conflict with nature.
New innovations, such as the growth of artificial intelligence and, most recently, virtual and augmented reality in the metaverse, are being heralded as a panacea for all our problems. As with every innovation and development in society, the metaverse has benefits and drawbacks. One of the dangers inherent in the metaverse and avatars is that they seem to offer us a more authentic form of reality. They also give the user a feeling of possessing godlike powers in a similar way to the character of Gilgamesh. If we are not careful, these could lead us, as was the case with Gilgamesh and the Mesopotamian civilisation, to our own demise.
Storyline
Madame Raquin raises her sickly son Camille alone. When he is still a child, her brother leaves Madame his illegitimate daughter Thérèse, who was conceived on one of his sea voyages with the daughter of an African tribal chief. Seemingly warmly welcomed into the family, Madam Raquin exploits her adopted daughter as a companion and nurse for Camille.
When both children have grown up, she arranges a marriage between them. Thérèse, always reminded of the crushing debt of gratitude to her aunt, reluctantly takes on the never-ending responsibility for Camille, who imperiously and petulantly ignores her feelings. Thérèse withdraws into herself and silently submits to her situation. In the process, fierce aversions towards Camille and her aunt arise within her, forming the breeding ground for a desperate attempt to break out.
She meets Laurent, who roughly forces himself on her, igniting her passion. She begins an adulterous affair with him, which is consummated in the domestic marriage bed, in close proximity to Madame who is downstairs in the apartment. Thérèse's relationship with Laurent becomes an anchor point for hope for a better future, with the intensity and passion consuming all reason and both plunging further and further into their imagined love. To eliminate the one who prevents them from staying together, they both decide to kill Camille. They arrange a boat trip on the river, during which Laurent drowns Camille.
In the time of mourning, they both keep a low profile, but manage to awaken the thought in the Madame that marriage between Thérèse and Laurent is now the logical consequence. The wedding night, however, is already marked by rejections, recriminations and disgust. What follows is a downward spiral - fostered by delusions, greed and rudeness - that ends in brute violence. As a result of Thérèse's remorse towards Madame and Camille, she accepts this almost with open arms as just punishment for her sins. She longs for forgiveness. All this happens before the eyes of Madame and the domino society, all of whom have no idea that Thérèse is involved in her husband's murder. Madame's wordlessly punishing gaze and the violent quarrels with Laurent eventually become so unbearable that Thérèse lurches towards another murder. This is, however, where the opera deviates from the novel, as Thérèse decides against renewed violence shortly before the final catastrophe, instead opting for an independent life. In the novel, on the other hand, Thérèse and Laurent end up committing suicide together under Madame's eyes.
True Crime, Naturalism and Voyeurism
Emile Zola is considered one of the founders of literary and theatrical naturalism, which spread from France to Europe and eventually to the USA. The author sees himself as a scientist. He places characters with a certain disposition (temperaments) in a certain milieu and describes how the characters behave under the influence of others - similar to the way a chemist makes different substances react with each other. The fact that the focus was on environments far below the upper class gave naturalism its socially critical side. Consequently, there are no heroes in naturalism, only figures who are the focus of attention. Their ugly side and the lack of dignity in their actions are described just as much as their positive sides. The narrator dispenses with a moral classification of what is shown in favour of a detailed description of the experimental set-up and the events.
Crime and punishment, sin and redemption play a central role in Zola's novel, and not only in Camille's murder. Rather, they are an element woven tightly through the various levels of the
novel, appearing in conversations between the characters and the emotional bonds between Thérèse and her family, and thus seemingly inevitably ending in the violent crime.
Although Thérèse and Laurent successfully cover up the murder in the novel, the failure of their relationship seems inevitable. Paranoia and fear increasingly lead to violent confrontations. In the war between the couple, the question of guilt becomes a central issue. It leads back to the beginnings of the affair between Thérèse and Laurent, to the marriage with Camille as well as the exploitative behaviour of the aunt, all the way to Thérèse's biological father, Madame's brother, who disowned Thérèse.
Even before that, her father had violated the laws of the African tribe by fathering a child with a native woman as a foreigner. Whether and how any of these acts could have been avoided or atoned for remains unclear. The murder of Camille seems to atone for the original injustice of Thérèse's abduction and marriage. Even so there is no liberation in it.
Today too: a murder occurs in the neighbourhood. Suspicion falls on those who were close to the victim. The neighbours seem horrified, but at the same time lust for gory details and always want to have suspected it. Public outrage is always the cloak under which the greed for sensation is satisfied. At the same time, the outrage serves as a safe moral demarcation of one's own actions. The constant interest in true crime formats and crime reporting reflect this, as does the continuing success of fictional crime stories on television.
Psychology and structure
Lieske unfolds his opera on three levels. The first level is carried by Thérèses' perspective. We gain insight into the character's psychology, her longings, her pain, her dreams of a different life. Other characters also provide glimpses of their inner world on this level. On the second level is the account of the retired detective who is a member of the Domino Society. This account, which can often be read as text superimposed on the action, consists of investigation files and officially obtained information on the course of events. Finally, the third level juxtaposes the earthly madness with Goethe's “Gesang der Geister über den Wassern” in a monumental choral movement. In three symphonic blocks, a cosmic counter-world unfolds and is assembled into a "superhuman" overall sound. Here we also hear motifs of longing which, beyond earthly distress, herald a bond between man and (his) nature.
The metaphorical space for this unity is water: in the form of the sea as a place of longing; in the form of the exhalation of the sick husband as disgust; and in the form of the river as a scene of crime. There is a "Sinfonia" at the beginning of each main section and at the end of the work. They represent the three stations: River, Mortuary and Transformation. The transformation is the final change from water to light and Thérèse's departure into freedom.
Audio excerpts (Sample audio)
Selected compositions
Dreamtime (WDR Symphony at Cologne Philharmonic)
Video: YouTube
Weitere Information / Further Informations
Über den Wassern: STANZA 7 (Hilliard Ensemble at EXPO2000 in Hannover)
Weitere Information / Further Informations
Nacht Dauer Rose: Rose (Henryk Böhm - Baritone, Eleonore Klauser - Piano)
Weitere Information / Further Informations
Project coordination and contact
Publishing house and agent
© 2023 - IMPRINT / PRIVACY POLICY