glimpses of a vaster landscape
by
Douglas Messerli
Missy
Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek (libretto), Missy Mazzoli (composer) Song from the Uproar: The lives and
Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt / Los Angeles, Redcat (The Roy and Edna
Disney/CalArts Theater) / the performance Howard Fox and I attended was a
matinee on Sunday, October 11, 2015
In
her program notes for her short opera Song
from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt, composer
Missy Mazzoli briefly describes her subject as being born in Geneva,
Switzerland in 1877, who—after the death of her father, mother and brother—traveled
alone to Algeria, dressed as a man. Once there, the short synopsis, continues
she “joined a Sufi order, roamed the desert on horseback and fell in love with
an Algerian soldier. After surviving an attempted assassination and a failed
suicide pact with her lover, Isabelle drowned in a desert flash flood at age 27.”
The composer suggests that we have only a few short stories, articles, and
fragments from the journals that survived the flood to help us comprehend this “fearless”
woman, and, accordingly, she “felt that an opera about her life should be
similarly fragmented—an evocation of her dreams and thoughts rather than a
straightforward narrative.”
The opera Mazzoli has created consists of
17 short songs, using repeated phrases found in the surviving pages of
Eberhardt’s journal, along with highly stylized and synchronic mime-like
gestures and dance movements by the 5 chorus members (meant, evidently, to
represent the various personas of Eberhardt), along with film clips that
reinforce any thematic content presented, and a five-man ensemble of double
bass, electric guitar, clarinet and bass clarinet, piano, and flute and
piccolo.
The film clips, sorry to say, are rather prosaic images taken from images of Eberhardt as a child and adult, as well as, what might be expected, a floating, drowning woman. The dance movements, while often well-executed, often seem superfluous, as if they are merely there to bring some motion into the otherwise quite static opera; sometimes it appears, almost, as if the figures were executing some unreadable sign language. The libretto, based on the fragments of Eberhardt’s journal, poetically rendered by Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek, certainly do not precisely tickle the ear as much as representing a kind of list of associated words:
ISABELLE
Sight, smell, taste, touch
Sight, smell, taste, touch
songs, hymns, verses, silence,
refrains,
the sound, the noise, the voice,
sixty-five names for God.
CHORUS
Prime, odd, even, addition.
ISABELLE
Units, miles, bolded lines.
CHORUS
Circle, square, exponential.
ISABELLE
Square, fence.
ISABELLE AND
CHORUS
Prison,
embrace, remembrance.
At
other times, as in the short paean to our hero’s independence “I Have Arrived,”
seem almost as banal as a popular ditty:
ISABELLE
I have arrived -
I'll pick out my own song,
a music that will bleed the heart
into
silence.
I have arrived -
I'll pick out my own song,
line by line, and at last
throw
back my head and sing.
And
many of the recitative-like pronouncements are almost indistinguishable from
one another.
What makes this chamber opera remarkable
is Mazzoli’s beautifully shimmering, ethereal, and sometimes electric-guitar-whining
score performed by excellent Mezzo-Soprano Abigail Fischer. Reminiscent, at
moments, of John Adams, and, for a few instants, of John Zorn, Mazzoli’s music
is the crucial element that encouraged the sold-out audience with whom I attended
the event to thoroughly embrace this hour and one-half work, imbuing Song from the Uproar with a glorious
sense of uplift that isn’t quite matched by the rest of its parts.
In truth, Eberhardt was the daughter not
of her mother’s wealthy husband, General Pavel de Moerder, but of the family’s
tutor, Alexandre Trophimowsky, a former priest and anarcrist, who taught his
daughter and her brother French, Russian, Italian, Latin, Greek, and,
eventually, classical Arabic. Trophimowsky encouraged the young girl to read
the Koran, while looking the other way when she, from early on, dressed as a
sailor boy. At an early age Eberhardt begin to write stories—including one about
male homosexuality.
Even before traveling to Algeria, she
corresponded regularly with her half-brother, Augustin, who had joined the
French Foreign Legion, encouraging him to keep and share with her a detailed
diary of what he saw and experienced in North Africa, while also corresponding
with a French officer, Eugène Letord, who was stationed in the Sahara. Soon
after her writings, written under a male pseudonym, spoke out strongly against
colonialism.
Invited by the Algerian-French
photographer, Louis David, to visit him in Algeria, she and her mother traveled
to North Africa, living with the Davids. Despite their hosts’ disapproval, both
she and her mother spent long hours with local Arabs, both mother and daughter
converting to Islam, and, eventually, moving out of the French neighborhood to
live in an Arabic-style house.
It was not simply that Eberhardt dressed
like a man, but that she dressed in burnous and turban like an Arab man that
made her a social pariah to the French settlers. Her mother did not die in
Switzerland, as Mazzoli suggests, but in Algeria, and was buried as Fatma
Mannoubia.
Meanwhile, Eberhardt continued to
practice the Muslim religion—despite her attraction to alcohol and drugs—and,
in later years, made contact with a Sufi order, the Qadiriyya, whose leader permitted
to engage in that order’s secret rites.
In the last years of the 19th
century, because of family deaths and her inheritance of the family villa,
Eberhardt was forced to return to Europe, becoming determined to travel to
Paris to seek out a career as a writer.
There, by chance, she met the widow of
the Marquis de Morès, whose husband had been killed by Tuareg tribesman in the
Sahara. She paid for Eberhardt to return to North Africa in order to search out
the cause of his death, an offer which the adventurer could not resist, even if
she did actually pursue that quest.
During this trip she met the Algerian
soldier Slimane Ehnni; the two fell in love, but were disallowed by the French
colonial government to marry. Indeed by this time the French rulers, not only
outraged by her dress and behavior, suspected her of being involved in
espionage, which may have been the cause of her attempted assassination by a
man with a sabre. Today she would surely be seen as a terrorist.
The government also arranged to reassign
Ehnni to another region, which brought about Eberhardt’s failed suicide
attempt. Forced again to return to France, Eberhardt lived with her brother
Augustin and his wife, working with her brother, she in male dress, as a dock
laborer.
Eberhardt and Ehnni finally married when
her lover was reassigned to Marseilles, returning to Algeria as French citizens
to live with Ehnni’s family. When the couple relocated to Algiers, a newspaper
editor hired her to report on the Battle of El-Moungar. There, while staying
with members of the French Foreign Legion, she met and befriended Hubert
Lyautey, the French officer placed in charge of Oran, and it is generally
acknowledged that she may have some spying for Lyautey.
Weakened by fever, Eberhardt headed for
Aïn Sefra, and requested Ehnni, whom she had not seen for several months, to
join her. It is there, during a flash flood that the great adventurer died, her
husband surviving.
Despite Mazzoli’s claim that we have only
a few stories and her journal with which to piece together Eberhardt’s life, at
least 13 books written by her have been published since her death, including
the full fiction, Trimardeur.
Eberhardt’s larger-than-life adventures
reveal her as a figure more like T.E. Lawrence than the slightly disconcerted
proto-feminist that this opera represents her to be. In short, Song from the Uproar’s creators have done
a disservice to their subject with their presentation of a few fragmentary,
poetically rendered songs which cast her adventures in the form of a
chamber-work instead of what it longs to be—a grand opera, with or without
narrative coherency.
One can only hope that, at some point,
Mazzoli applies her obvious musical talent to a work of greater depth and
grander vision.
Los Angeles,
October 12, 2015
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