Liebeslied / My Suicides

When I was a child, my mother took me to a production of Puccini’s opera La Bohème (1896), sung in Serbo-Croat. I couldn’t understand a word, but it didn’t matter; the glorious music, overacting and hollow-eyed performers made the tale of bohemian romance, desperation and death pretty explicit. I hadn’t thought about that evening of revelry for a long time; not, in fact, until I experienced the somewhat different problems of translation offered up by a new opera, Liebeslied/My Suicides, a collaboration between artist Rut Blees Luxemburg, philosopher and first-time librettist Alexander Garcia Düttmann, composer Paul Clark and choreographer Tom Sapsford.
Inspired by a series of photographs that Luxemburg published four years ago, Liebeslied/My Suicides is apparently the investigation of a relationship between ‘an artist, a writer and a lover’ – although if I hadn’t read the programme, I wouldn’t have known, as it wasn’t obvious who was who. A small selection of Luxemburg’s photographs of nocturnal, often damp, desolation were projected on a screen at the back of the minimal stage, on which three singers (a tenor, mezzo and soprano), dressed in layers of black or white faux 1980s winter wear by London designers Boudicca, sang often incomprehensible, if occasionally moving, arias, duets and trios. Action was kept to a minimum; despair seemed the paramount emotion, although despair about what was not clear, even if the link between suicide and photography – the intense focus on a moment’s or a life’s annihilation – is. Clark’s concentrated and often beautiful musical score, performed by a chamber orchestra with two pianos, comprised marches, scherzos and elegies which collided in moments of seemingly organic and occasionally atonal disruption. At one point hooks descended from the ceiling and picked up white shapes from the stage; these dangled like blank placards or geometric leaves in front of the projection, lending it a hallucinogenic, fragmented depth. Meanwhile, the air was hot, the atmosphere close. A heating pipe clacked behind my head like a broken metronome, distracting attention away from the performance; everything conspired against clarity and calm.
This is when my memories of watching an opera in a language I don’t speak returned to me, despite the fact that this one was sung in English. Although some phrases were audible – ‘be my guide, I am blind, be my guide’ or ‘the world of the photograph is a world of pure facts’ – most, apart from the occasional projected text, were lost amid the aural and visual textures. To have a philosopher write a libretto that is difficult to hear is a missed opportunity, akin to using a malfunctioning high-tech projector in an exhibition that demands sharp-focused images. The driven, intense relationship between the three singers, the images and the music, spinning on the fulcrum of words, was rendered a little meaningless once access to those words – however wonderfully performed – was lost.