On Friday, Sept. 27, at Cal Performances’ Zellerbach Hall, American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) presented the U.S. premiere of its production of Olivier Messiaen’s Harawi. Written in 1945, the song cycle, for soprano and piano, isn’t an opera, but AMOC’s production, melding music and movement, turns Harawi into an hour of intimate drama.
Messiaen composed the piece, subtitled Chant d’amour et de mort (Song of love and death), at a personally difficult time. He had returned to Paris from a German prison camp to find that his wife, composer and violinist Claire Delbos, was beginning to experience mental and physical health problems. By 1945, he had met, and perhaps fallen in love with, the much younger piano virtuoso and composer Yvonne Loriod. She had already played in the premieres of several important works Messiaen had written for her, and she would eventually become his second wife after Delbos’ death.
Harawi sets a dozen oblique, allusive poems by Messiaen himself, which are largely in French but also contains bits of Sanskrit and the Quechuan languages of the Andes Mountains. The cycle is one of three works Messiaen wrote in the 1940s that derive from the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde. In Harawi, there’s a courtship between an unnamed man and a woman referred to as Piroutcha. In the end, they merge with nature, transcending life; song of love and death, indeed.
The text incorporates numerous images from nature: birds, fire, water, stars, the sky, flowers, fruits, pearls, colors. The man repeatedly addresses Piroutcha as a “green dove.” It all feels deeply enmeshed with the music, which is unmistakably Messiaen’s. Skittering piano lines, birdsong, uncentered harmonies, and complex rhythms are all there.
The soprano Julia Bullock, a founding member of AMOC, is at the heart of the production. She has long had an interest in Harawi and also concerns about Messiaen’s appropriation of the centuries-old Andean practice of harawi, an Indigenous tradition that’s both poetic and musical.
Bullock and Zack Winokur, AMOC’s artistic director, worked together to find a way to perform Harawi that would encompass more than what’s on the printed page. They spoke with living practitioners of the tradition, who described it as including improvisation and inviting “movement and sound to become extensions of each other.”
Then, Bullock and Winokur brought Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, both dancers and choreographers, into the project, along with pianist Conor Hanick. The result is this mysterious and moving production, which next travels to the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills on Oct. 1 and then to UC Santa Barbara’s Campbell Hall on Oct. 4 (presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures).
Winokur sets the stage simply, placing Hanick’s piano center, approximately where it would be for a conventional recital. At the back of the stage, there’s an indefinite black mass, and toward the front, there’s a bench.
Bullock begins Harawi seated on the bench and from there delivers the first song, the serene “La ville qui dormait, toi” (The village that slept, you). She ends the cycle in the same place, but in between, she’s in near constant motion, moving with the confidence of a dancer, though less balletically than Smith and Schraiber.
Smith enters with the second song, “Bonjour toi, colombe verte” (Good day to you, green dove), whirling smoothly at the rear of the stage, bending forward and backward, her long hair spilling away from her. Soon she moves downstage, hugging Bullock toward the end of the song. Is Smith the green dove or is Bullock? Are they both? Does it matter?
Schraiber enters stage left, dancing with jagged ferocity, and begins to interact with Bullock and Smith. Over the course of Harawi, we see a delicate interweaving of the three. They circle each other and dance alone, in pairs, as a trio — toward each other and away. Schraiber sits on the piano bench, back to back with Hanick, and the two move together for a bit. Elsewhere, Bullock and Smith, standing (also back to back), mirror the men’s movements.
All three lie on the floor in various combinations. Comfort is offered; they embrace in pairs. Bullock hugs one, then the other. The dancers leave the stage; they return. They walk past each other without acknowledgement or touch. The three are connected, whether physically or not.
The program notes don’t assign particular roles or names to Bullock, Smith, and Schraiber, leaving open the question of whether their parts can be mapped onto Messiaen, Delbos, and Loriod. The notes do put forth the possibility that Harawi might be asking how you “stay connected to someone you love while the accumulated memories of your relationship begin to fade or drift,” suggesting that the cycle alludes to Delbos and her condition. Other sources suggest that Loriod was the inspiration.
Regardless, these four performers are magnificent. Smith and Schraiber dance with vulnerability and power throughout, while Hanick’s crystalline pianism clarifies the intricate score. Still, it’s Bullock who ties the enterprise together, singing with an endless musical line and seemingly infinite colors. She can lighten her voice to an airy thread or darken it with sorrow. During one song on Friday, her tone seemed like that of a clarinet — focused, instrumental, with just a hint of reediness. While her French could have been more forward, with crisper enunciation (her vowels were too rounded), her interpretive power and gorgeous voice more than carried the day.
