Watching helplessly as a loved one gradually loses control of mind and body is one of the most gut-wrenching experiences imaginable. A powerless partner can be overwhelmed by despair, rage, anguish, and even the occasional moment of joy when a connection is fleetingly made.
French composer Olivier Messiaen underwent such an ordeal in the mid-1940s, only a few years after surviving a stint in a Nazi prison camp. A devout Catholic who considered marriage sacred, he grieved as his beloved wife, violinist and composer Claire Delbos, suffered from a series of maladies that resulted in amnesia and, ultimately, death.
Messiaen poured his intense, sometimes conflicting feelings into the song cycle Harawi, a unique work of tragedy and transcendence that draws on a range of influences, from composers Richard Wagner and Maurice Ravel to the music of the Andes Mountains. Now, soprano Julia Bullock, pianist Conor Hanick, and two adventurous dancers are bringing this 1945 masterpiece to vivid life in a new production created by New York City-based American Modern Opera Company, set to receive its U.S. premiere at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on Sept. 27 for the opening night of Cal Performances’ 2024–2025 season.
They will also tour the work to the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills on Oct. 1 and to UC Santa Barbara’s Campbell Hall on Oct. 4 (presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures).
“I am swept away by Messiaen,” said Bullock, who was scheduled to debut this Harawi at the 2022 Ojai Music Festival but had to cancel after testing positive for COVID-19. “He was not shyly passing through the world. He really wanted people to sense what he was sensing. It hits so deeply.”
“At its core, I think Messiaen’s music is about love,” explained Hanick in a separate interview. “There are extreme depictions of violence, loss, and despair, but these exist to frame, amplify, and elevate the sublimative power of love.”
Bullock, whose many Bay Area appearances include the 2017 premiere of John Adams’s Girls of the Golden West at San Francisco Opera, as well as more recently working as one of San Francisco Symphony Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen’s collaborative partners, discovered Harawi a decade ago. She immediately knew she had to perform it but didn’t feel ready and for years limited herself to presenting individual Messiaen songs in recital.
Her reticence is understandable. “The vocal writing is extreme and demanding,” she noted of the song cycle. “It goes from the most pianissimo bel canto moments to full-on throwing-up-your-guts screaming.”
Harawi, while reflecting Messiaen’s unique musical language, familiar to fans of his Quartet for the End of Time (written in the aforementioned prison camp) and Turangalila Symphony (created immediately after this song cycle), also incorporates something different for the composer: Indigenous Andean music.
“I imagine he came across that material, was deeply inspired by the symbolism and rituals of this music, and used it as a source of inspiration,” Bullock mused. “It gave him permission to write freely about something that was so very painful. It gave him a way to begin.”
Over the years, the soprano contemplated how best to present this challenging work, knowing that she did not want to simply stand and sing it. She and director Zack Winokur, her former classmate at the Juilliard School and a longtime collaborator, ultimately decided that the music would best be served by incorporating two dancers, Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber.
“Sometimes the dancers are figures described in the text,” Winokur said. “Sometimes they’re feelings or ghosts. Sometimes they form an evocative, symbolic image that visualizes an idea.”
And sometimes Bullock joins in the movement.
“I’m not a very still singer or a very still person,” Bullock said with a chuckle. “Dance is a part of my performing arts background. I think there’s a space Messiaen left for this material to be embodied.”
Winokur agrees and said Bullock’s participation only adds to the experience.
“Part of what makes Julia so special is she is so in her body,” he said. “She really is part of the choreography at all times. Often it’s subtle, but there are times when she really goes for it, and when she does, she doesn’t look like a singer dancing.”
He noted that the libretto, which Messiaen himself wrote, is poetic and often cryptic, in contrast with the emotional directness of the music. When you hear the piece “in the context of people actually touching each other and moving in space toward one another, you stop focusing on following the text and focus on their bodies,” Winokur said.
“I imagine that’s what [Messiaen] was finding with Claire. He couldn’t communicate with her through words, but they still had a physical connection.”
No doubt more than a few audience members will be able to relate to those fraught circumstances.
“It’s a cycle of grief in a way,” Winokur said. “But in the process of moving through that, there’s comedy, joy, contentment. These are the messy, complicated feelings that one has in extreme circumstances.”
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
