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There is plenty still to be said, written and done on the subject of the conquest of the New World, and Patricia Petibon is one of those rare performers who has the gift of letting us look at the imagery of the past with fresh eyes and making everything seem timeless – the hallmark of great artists.
In 1768 the young Spanish priest and adventurer Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón y Bujanda first set foot on Peruvian soil. He oversaw the building of villages, schools and hospitals, travelled the length and breadth of the country and left thousands of pages of enlightening material for posterity. These include the famous music manuscripts that Patricia has re-opened for us some 250 years later: two tonadas and a cachua whose astonishingly raw and universal language will speak to everyone who hears it. The themes are fatal jealousy, a call to entertainment and celebration. Why does this music, written on the other side of the world in the 18th century, seem so close to us?
The songs we hear today are the outcome of a long and wondrous history of different unions across space and time. Here, this history begins with J’ai vu le loup, one of the cornerstones of modern popular music, which would not have sounded strange to the colonists nor, consequently, to the people they encountered. Through its improvisatory quality and harmonic and rhythmic language it says almost everything: this is the “joyful” root.
Another strain illustrates the very human need to confide and to dream that is summed up in Greensleeves. Legend has it that this famous traditional song was Henry VIII’s complaint to Anne Boleyn, composed by the king himself. It makes use of a ground bass, the backbone of Baroque music, and an essential link between Europe and the Americas that is found in the romanesca, passamezzo and chaconne: what could cross frontiers better than an insistent repeated motif to the rhythm of a beating heart?
Pastoral love is another universal link. Along with the song Mon amy s’en est allé (printed in 1615 by Jacques Mangeant), Charpentier’s Sans frayeur dans ce bois, on a chaconne ostinato bass frequently found on the western side of the Atlantic, explores a theme entirely bound up with the conquest of the New World, that of the thirst for adventure. With the character of Medea, Charpentier also gives us a timeless scene, that of the torment of love, of the anger that leads the sorceress to invoke the divinities of the Styx – that broad river of the underworld, the end of a journey of no return for so many explorers.
Purcell, also using a ground bass, gives us another version of the failure of conquest in his portrayal of the ill-fated love of Dido, queen of Carthage, for Aeneas, the Trojan hero who abandons her. Both of their destinies are bound up with nations on either side of a sea. In King Arthur, the same composer illustrates another aspect of the New World: the myth of the natural state that was so prized in the 18th century. His is an island of tranquility, the setting we dream of for both frolics and amorous deceptions.
Rameau’s later response to this subject was his Indes galantes, with its scene of the Great Peace-Pipe (in the entrée of “Les Sauvages”). Here we are in an American forest, after the Indians have lost a battle against the Franco-Spanish troops. Zima, the chief’s daughter, rejects the advances of two European soldiers, and chooses instead the Indian Adario. All’s well that ends well, in the peace that is restored between the “savages” and the colonizing armies. Here again there is an insistent rhythm, a dance that perfectly illustrates the idea of the New World. At the beginning of the same opéra-ballet, in another entrée entitled Le Turc généreux (“The Noble Turk”), the French girl Émilie, a prisoner of the pasha Osman, who is in love with her, is caught up in a storm. The same thing happens to the heroine of the zarzuela Vendado es amor, no es ciego (“Love is Blindfolded, Not Blind”), by the Spanish composer José de Nebra where the vocalises in the aria “El bajel que no recela” are almost enough to make the listener seasick. Is this a storm at sea, or a storm in the heart?
This idea is never very far away, for example in No se enmendará jamás, one of the first Spanish secular cantatas, the work of none other than Handel. He wrote this piece in Rome in 1707, for Cardinal Ottoboni, who enjoyed nothing better than to lay down a challenge to one of the greatest masters of the art of song. Commissioned by Ottoboni, Handel tackled cantatas in Italian, Spanish and French. For the Spanish one, a guitar is essential, and the performers here provide a fine example of an introductory improvisation.
South American Baroque music stands at the crossroads of numerous influences – Iberian, English, French, folk or more cultivated – and its modern revival has expanded our range of instrumental colour and given an extra brightness to our approach to rhythm. There was a constant two-way traffic between these various influences, and today we know about only some of the stages. To gain a better idea of it all, we caught up with Patricia Petibon in one of the “ports of embarkation”:
Patricia, you are one of those artists who always take us to unknown territory. What for you is the relationship between your vocal art and the idea behind “Nouveau Monde”?
Singing is the art of the moment, the trigger for our imaginations to take flight. Everything around me, jazz, rock and world music, feeds into what I sing. The “Nouveau Monde” here is the one revealed to me by William Christie, Jordi Savall and Nikolaus Harnoncourt when they revolutionized the approach to style and sound, but it is one that always has to be expanded with new explorations and new conquests. They taught me how to listen with my eyes. I remember the impact of the first time I heard the Four Seasons played by Il Giardino Armonico. What I’m interested in is seeking out a new type of sound to work with, and that’s what draws me to the conductors, orchestras and musicians I collaborate with, and makes me curious about their work, like Andrea Marcon in this project.
This new recording seems to be the logical next step after your previous discs, but also the result of different experiences in your career.
With this disc I’ve achieved something I’ve been looking for for years: a laboratory of sounds and new musical textures, mostly provided by percussion and exotic instruments. I’ve had the good fortune to explore an extremely wide repertoire, and recently the role of Berg’s Lulu – which for me represents the conquest of a new world – strengthened my desire to search for depth and meaning. At the time I was moving on to a new stage in my personal life, and this idea of conquering a new world naturally led me to the incredible human adventure of the discovery of the Americas. We know about the tragic side of this history but, that aside, the clash of civilizations produced some fascinating artistic interchanges. Today musicians from the Andes take their music all round the world, bringing us back something that has been nourished by our own music.
You take us on a long journey with this programme. one thinks of all the different journeys that mark an opera singer’s career. Are you a keen traveller?
It was the notion of a “crossing” that I wanted to evoke on this disc: of crossing the seas, discovering new lands, the idea of those seafarers and explorers like Christopher Columbus or Hernán Cortés. I like Cortés’s ｅxpression “mar adentro”, plunging into the sea, committing yourself to the sea, and also plunging into passion, into life, taking risks! “Se hace camino al andar”, says the poet Antonio Machado: “The road is made by walking”. That’s exactly what I look for in music, making your own way.
Apart from the geographical distance, this “New World” also takes us on a journey across time. When you sing a popular medieval song, a Baroque aria, a Romantic cavatina, Lulu, or a song by Jeff Buckley, do you think of the different periods that these pieces of music represent? How do you relate to history?
We have to open up the libraries and let them breathe! And open up musicology so that its fruits can be shared in the best conditions possible, to let audiences enjoy the beauty and wonder of this music. In this programme I’ve stayed with this union of popular and cultivated music to establish the past in the present. For the scenes from Médée, for instance, I’ve adopted a pronunciation that is in style, but not “reconstructed”, so that I can emphasize what is contemporary about the character, and keep the special colour of French music that means so much to me. Médée, like all great masterpieces, is timeless. on the other hand, for J’ai vu le loup, I worked with Dominique Visse on historical pronunciation so that I could have more freedom within the original character, the “groove” of this song, and that meant we could indulge in some improvisation. I like to contrast different musical genres, different modes of ｅxpression through historic or contemporary pronunciation, using improvisation too, which is something that plays a special role on this disc. We worked a lot with Andrea Marcon and all the players early on, but also during the sessions, in the heat of the moment, when you have that fresh, free and spontaneous mood that is part and parcel of all improvisation. And we needed very few takes: I prefer moments that are “real”.
Knowing you, one imagines that this programme will not be your last “New World”. What doors does this conquest open up for you today?
Conquering new audiences, the pleasure of sharing it all with people from different backgrounds. I’m thinking particularly of a Brazilian pop radio station that is now taking an interest in my work. Another example that comes to mind is Michael Haneke’s historic production of Don Giovanni, which is so clear and faithful to Mozart, and yet shifts the action into a decidedly contemporary setting. I remember all these young people in the audience saying to us after the show, “Oh, is that what opera is like?!” This is the direction that I’m going to keep on following, so that I can open this music up to the audiences of today. The way I approach music speaks to certain people, and they discover something that they hadn’t imagined existed. That’s the greatest conquest, the best kind of “New World” there is.
Olivier Lexa – Artistic Director, Venetian Centre for Baroque Music |
