Production for rent: L'Autre voyage

Number of Principals: 4 (including 1 child)
Chorus / parts (S/A/T/B): 30 (9/7/7/7)
+ children chorus : 22

Instrumentation
50 : 9-8-6-6-4 / 2.2.2.2 / 2.2.3.0 / 1timp 1harp

Other info
Last performed : Opéra de Dijon, March 2024
Production : Opéra-Comique
Coproduction : Opéra de Dijon
 

Schubert only completed half of his lyrical projects, very few of which were brought to the stage. From these attempts, we are left with scattered fragments, glimpses that conceal extraordinary treasures. This show pays homage to these unfinished works through a narrative in the form of a journey – one more – led by a being haunted by finitude, for whom music serves as a tool of understanding.

As night falls, a forensic pathologist receives a body that he soon recognizes as his own double. He then embarks on a moral and emotional dissection that confronts him with his memories, death, and oblivion.

Eager to offer the Viennese composer a stage that brings him closer to us, Raphaël Pichon and Silvia Costa unearth forgotten scores, jewels of lyricism and melancholy, where the ghosts of a work emerge in a theater that is both anatomical and psychic.

“L’Autre Voyage honors [Schubert’s lyrical projects’] incompleteness. The project takes this incompleteness as its starting point and interrogates it – as both a motif, a theme, a dramaturgical tool, and a structural element. It is not about completing an existing work or reconstructing an imaginary opera – that is, finishing what is irreducibly unfinished. We embody this issue by imagining a character of a meticulous and taciturn doctor. He receives a body to autopsy: an inert body... which is none other than his own. This anti-hero begins a dissection of his own double, a metaphorical dissection of a journey to the depths of his psyche. During this exploration, it becomes apparent that this strange double is actually just a nightmare, the manifestation of a painful realization: in the heart of this character, something died with the disappearance of his own child. The presence of this child, who disappeared too soon and left behind so many unfulfilled promises, still haunts this doctor and his wife. Their grieving memory is punctuated by untimely memories, fragmented moments of life. However, the mental journey they undertake ultimately culminates in light, in the serene acceptance of the finitude that inhabits us all – that is, in the acceptance that incompleteness is constitutive of our being in the world" - Raphaël Pichon, musical director & Silvia Costa, stage director

"L’Autre Voyage could not have found a better creative duo than stage director Silvia Costa (representing everyday things to infer their humanity of use) and conductor Raphaël Pichon (a bridge-builder between repertoires from the 17th to the 19th centuries, and creator of thematic programs, such as Miranda, around Purcell, in September 2017). Guided by 'beauty' – as they themselves say – they listened to Schubert's legacy to gather its most beautiful excerpts, with a guiding principle that led to a rewriting (by Raphaëlle Blin) of certain texts to better blend into the landscape thus shaped. Then, through certain harmonic welds and reorchestrations (by Robert Percival), the spectacle took shape under the poetic expression witnessed on this opening night."

Opéraonline.com / 1er février 2024 / Thibault Vicq

"There are works that carry you away, and others that plunge you into yourself. L’Autre Voyage would be of the latter kind: an inner journey that questions us about the losses that shape our existence. (…)If one is familiar with the dark melancholy of Schubert's lieder and Silvia Costa's stage direction, one also discovers, with relief and joy, their possibilities of light. (…) Overflowing with inventiveness, this staging features a succession of tableaux that are so many pathways between life and death."

Transfuge.fr / 2 février 2024 / Oriane Jeancourt