L'inondation

Il était une fois une femme, aimant un homme, aimée de lui, mais sans enfant. Dans leur petit appartement au bord du fleuve, la vie semble tourner au ralenti, comme les machines de l’usine à côté, silencieuse, immobile, traversée par les vents d’automne et l’agitation des voisins alentours.

Une nuit pluvieuse, la jeune fille du dernier étage, dont le père vient de mourir, est amenée chez eux. L’homme et la femme décident de la garder.

La vie reprend. Arrive le printemps, des liens se nouent entre l’homme et la jeune fille, de plus en plus proches. La femme reste en retrait, délaissée, muette face à cette intimité rivale qui s’installe au quotidien. La résignation, la jalousie, le ressentiment, passions tragiques d’une Médée ou d’une Hermione ici privées de mots, l’entraînent au bord du gouffre.

Un jour de crue, la femme se laisse déborder par ses émotions. Une inondation dévaste leur appartement.

Hébergés quelques semaines par la famille du deuxième étage, chacun retrouve sa place. La nuit, l’homme et la femme sont à nouveau réunis, sur un divan au salon, tandis que la jeune fille partage la chambre des enfants.

Le jour où ils regagnent leur appartement, la jeune fille disparaît. Trois mois plus tard, la femme découvre qu’elle est enceinte.

L’enquête pour disparition n’est pas prolongée, la vie reprend, malgré les mauvais rêves et la tempête intérieure de la femme. Une petite fille naît. L’homme et la femme sont heureux.

Mais la vie, pour Zamiatine comme pour Pommerat, n’est pas un conte de fées. Hantée par le souvenir de la jeune fille, la femme sombre dans un délire fiévreux et prend, enfin, la parole, une parole qui libère, lui fût-elle fatale…

Marion Boudier

Besides being a theater of creation, the Opéra Comique is historically a theater of experimentation, the place of fruitful junction between music and dramatic literature. While opera aimed at the harmony of its constituent parts, opéra-comiquewas by definition heterogeneous, combining laughter and emotion, uncouthness and poetry. Thus, it was also at the Opéra Comique that, by the late nineteenth century, artists explored convergence solutions among art forms by renewing their writing and their relations to fiction, stage materiality and the audience.

Over the last decades, contemporary creators of opera have exhibited an additional willingness: making a collective experience of what is lived around the orchestra pit.

Then, how about an artistic approach that mobilizes authors, performers and theater staff for a common examination beginning with the writing of a production?

This is not the sole originality of L’Inondation. This opera was initially the project of a writer. For about ten years, Olivier Mantei and Joël Pommerat have exchanged on theater and opera, on their respective temporalities, which have gradually become irreconcilable. Today opera is subject to drastic constraints regarding schedule and budget while theater knows how to accommodate itself to the work in progress, or to stage composition in the case of Pommerat. 

However, would it not be advantageous for opera to enjoy the dynamics of theater, its freedom to search and experiment? These last years, the magnificent operatic productions for which Pommerat has adapted three of his pieces resulted in something certain: he had to write an original libretto and broach composition that produced its own necessity for music.

Once the notion was gained, there arose the portrait of a composer whose language would reconcile complex and contemporary writing with a deeply dramatic nature. A musician inclined to portray characters, develop a narrative, generate emotional tensions. With a passion for opera, Francesco Filidei also wished to confront dramatic composition.

The whole process of creation was thought afresh along with them at the very moment Zamyatin’s short story was chosen as the subject. The Opéra Comique joined forces to transform its usual production methods – which were adapted to the repertoire – in order to embrace their creative dynamics, the time required for research, experimentation, and interaction as well as for the literary, sound and scenic gestation.

The writing was the result of a time shared by the author and the composer, and then regularly broadened to the interpreters. The creative duet thus produced a work from a common viewpoint. The recording of the score – performed one year prior to the premiere to facilitate the stage director’s work – enabled the interpreters to approach the scenic part with the freedom of an accomplished musical learning. Finally, they all enjoyed more stage time than usual so that the dramaturgical part of the scenery was fully exploited in staging composition.

Thus, from January 2017 to September 2019, the Opéra Comique has taken its time for inspiration, reflection and sharing, and taken up the challenge of a new way of creating opera. L’Inondation, the new work by Pommerat and Filidei, pioneers a new complicity between opera and theater.

French text by Agnès Terrier
Traduction, Philipe Sicard