Vivier was an avant-garde Quebecois composer. The back of the DVD set asserts that "many consider [him] the greatest composer Canada has yet produced," and since I can't actually think of any others...well, okay. He was a student of Stockhausen, championed by Ligeti. He was kind of a mysterious figure; he was raised an orphan of unknown parentage, which mystery he was fixated on. But he's most known for his lurid end at the age of thirty-four or thirty-five (his exact birthday being unknown), stabbed to death in his Parisian flat by a male prostitute he'd picked up at a bar. And as a coda to that, a final unfinished piece of music was found in his apartment with a text about him going on the subway and meeting a young man who fascinated him, and ends thusly: "So he came to sit beside me and said, 'my name is Harry.' I told him that my name was Claude. And without further ado he pulled a knife out of his black, Parisian jacket, and stabbed me right through the heart." You have to admit, that's kind of eerie. Although when one of the people in the included documentary opines that the murder was the only way his life could have ended. It was something deep within him," I have to roll my eyes. What a load of mythologizing bullshit.
So what do we have here then, anyway? Well, this is a piece in two parts, the first being his short 1979 opera or opera-like object Kopernikus: Rituel de la Mort, and the second of something that's been designated Marco Polo (a figure who always interested Vivier) a series of pieces, some of which may have been in some vague way related, put together to, in theory, form a whole. We are told that Vivier himself, in letters, suggested that his work could be put together in this fashion, and so it is done. The producer here (Pierre Audi, my old frenemy) suggests that all of this stuff together forms an "opera fleuve," although you really do have to strain to see any kind of unity here. I think more than anything else, it's simply a retrospective of what's considered Vivier's most important work. Both halves together are about two hours and forty minutes.
I was certainly warned about this. People like to use words like "punishing" and "unpleasant" to describe Vivier's music. And given that I'm not really a fan of Stockhausen or Ligeti, one might well think that I was not the ideal audience here. But I'm a glutton for punishment, dammit, and the DVD set was going cheap, so here we are.
Okay. Kopernikus is not about Copernicus, heaven forfend. Well, saying it's "about" anything might be pushing it, but there's a woman named Agni who is possibly actually Alice from in Wonderland (if she has anything to do with Agni the fire god, that is not at all clear), who stumbles around a stage. There are other people there, including Mozart, Tristan and Isolde, and Lewis Carroll. But they don't say or do anything that would really identify them as these characters, so they don't make a lot of impact. Nothing happens. Really. Some of it is sung in French, and some in a language that Vivier made up. The music is cacophonous and atonal--kind of what I would have expected from a student of Stockhausen. The singers often are required to buzz their lips or move their hands in front of their mouths, which certainly creates a different sound. Is it a sound you actually want to hear? Well...I mean, it's not like it's unlistenable, for the most part, but it does, I found, get pretty tedious, even at just an hour.
The second part, perhaps natch, doesn't hold together as well as the first, and the first doesn't hold together at all. It's a very heterogenous mixture of instrumental and vocal pieces, with any effort at recurring characters being, let's say, obscure. However, I do have to say, it's dramatically more musically accessible. It varies, as you might expect, but there are some jaw-dropping moments, I must admit. Does it nonetheless get a bit boring sometimes? Well...yeah. And certainly the "Marco Polo" theme does not come through very clearly. But I liked it more than the first part, and when it abruptly cuts out--after the unfinished piece about his stabbing, of course--well, that's a pretty dramatic moment, if nothing else.
Still, whatever rating I give this may be irrelevant, since, indeed, I'm clearly not in the target audience. Maybe others love this stuff. Or maybe they're just faking it as part of a diabolical conspiracy to seem cool! No. I don't think people actually do that. I think they are sincere. The set includes an informative hour-long documentary in which various people talk about the experience of hearing Vivier and thinking, "holy shit, this is something completely new," and I want to strongly identify with that. It's certainly something I value greatly. But alas, I am forced to concede that I have my traditionalist leanings, re music.
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