St-François d’Assise: Scènes Franciscaines
An Opera in Three Acts and Eight Scenes (1983)
Text and Music by Olivier Messiaen

A Project of Kent Nagano and Georges Delnon
Part of the International Musikfest Hamburg

Staatsoper Hamburg / Philharmonische Staatsorchester Hamburg / Elbephilharmonie Hamburg
Audi Jugendchorakademie / Vokalensemble LauschWerk

Conductor: Kent Nagano / Director: Georges Delnon / Scenography: Thomas Jürgens / Costumes: Julia Matti / Video: Marcus Richardt / Camera Work and Editing: David Rankenhohn / Lighting: Stefan Boliger / Chorus Leaders: Martin Steidler and Maike Schuster.

St-François: Jacques Imbrailo / The Angel: Anna Prohaska / The Leper: Anthony Gregory / Brother Leo: Kartal Karagedik / Brother Masseo: Dovlet Nurgeldiyev / Brother Elias: Andrew Dickenson / Brother Bernard: David Minseck Kang.

A Review of the last of three performances, 9 June 2024, by Ken Quandt

The run in Hamburg was all too short. It will be impossible to represent this production on DVD, and impossible to move it elsewhere without fundamental revision. It is a pity therefore that it closed tonight, after only three performances – all sold out – rather than running for several weeks so that the world could have heard about it and come visit Hamburg to witness it.

It cannot be adequately filmed because the Grosser Saal at the Elbe-Philharmonie is an orchestra hall in-the-round rather than an opera house, with audience seated in terraces all around. Above the arena-of-an-orchestra (in this case 200 members) director Georges Delnon has built a small platform, accessible from the rear by two gangways where the spare action will take place, and places the divine member of the cast – the Angel, that is – elsewhere in the hall, popping up hither and yon, spotlighted among the terraces and the audience (everyone in the house can see four fifths of the others), and puts him once wandering into the orchestra between conductor and second violin. Delnon wants a “shared experience.” Above both the orchestra and the platform, suspended from the ceiling (which itself is a sort of inverted mushroom for its bright acoustics), hangs a huge cylindrical LED screen divided into quadrants facing north east south and west, presenting supertitles (in German) and also supplementary videos (unsurprisingly) that run throughout the piece, legible and visible to all.

Moreover, the performance cannot be easily moved. It culminates this year’s two-month International Musikfest at Hamburg whose theme is Krieg und Friedens (War and Peace, meant to face the current tensions in our world but also ruefully to recall the great devastation of Hamburg by the bombings of WW2, which the recent construction, in the midst of the wreckage, of this inimitably designed venue, the Elbe-Philharmonie, bold and completely odd inside and out, is meant to put behind the citizens of Hamburg, once and for all. Hamburg City is present in most of those continuous supplementary videos, and even in the action of the opera. Indeed, one would have done well to read the Program handed out for free by the ushers to learn something about the local street magazine Hinz&Kunzt, about the Hamburg climatologist Mojib Latif at Hamburg’s Akademie der Wissenschaften (it is really him, and really his office, in the video), about the Hamburg Sea-Watch 5 rescue operation, and about the Hamburger Hospiz im Helenenstift. These have quite a lot – and not quite enough – in common with the life and ministry of St. Francis: Hinz&Kunzt is a street paper, by the selling of which homeless persons can have a job and make a little money; Professor Latif is a widely heard advocate of a consensus ecology to stop global warming, the Sea-Watch group has sailed to the Mediterranean to rescue Muslim refugees at sea, and the Hamburger Hospiz is a private hospital-shelter for the dying. All good-doing, about which Hamburg can rightly be proud: good-doing because in addition to giving comfort to the dying they help the poor and the oppressed, or at least work to oppose, without a hint of self-righteousness, the regular run of mankind – lazy, self-centered, xenophobic polluters who care too little for the world and their neighbors (more below).

Despite all this, it is a great pity that the run is already over, for in my opinion it is the greatest production of this seldom-performed work in decades, or maybe ever, and this is primarily due to the devoted discipline of Kent Nagano, and the very hot hall in which he and his orchestra find themselves. Every sound is clear, even in the fugal and multi-layered “concert” of swarming bird songs played fortissimo in the Sixth Scene, enhanced by xylophones, gamelan, and three ondes martenots. And likewise, every quiet brush-sound and freshet of wind comes through unmistakably. The score is a polyphonic super-luminous musical miracle reaching far beyond the most copious initiatives of Wagner (more later), but other performances of the piece I have attended have sounded like recordings in comparison, even in the hall. The weakest element is, of course, the supplementary videos and their inevitably tenuous or faulty thematic relation to the Scenes that constitute the “spectacle” (as Messiaen called it, citing the usage of Berlioz, instead of an opera or an oratorio); and to illustrate and measure their inadequacy we need an account, as brief as possible, of the Scenes themselves, as composed by Messiaen – if you are still with me.

In the First Scene, Francis is walking along with his skittish Brother Leo, addicted to his fears and calling out to God. Francis pastors his “petite brebis” with a guessing game: what is the Perfect Joy? Surely it isn’t great knowledge, nor the ability to prophesy – we cannot glory in these since they are not ours but gifts from God. However, the choice to suffer the mistreatment Jesus suffered and to share his pain, so as to know and receive his love: that is the Perfect Joy! In the Second he is doing morning prayer with his Brothers and we learn something less edifying about him: God created ugly things too, but François recoils in horror at the sight and even the thought of a Leper! He ends his prayers with a petition that God send him a Leper he will have to love, as part of God’s creation. Prudence remembers that a prayer is also a promise (“Be careful what you pray for!”), and his prayer is immediately answered in the Third Scene, which takes place within a leper hospital in which the Brothers serve. Francis encounters a Leper who is angry at the world and he tells him to turn to God and drop his anger, which irritates the Leper even more, but then an Angel intervenes, whom only Francis can hear distinctly, who sings to the Leper that his heart is condemning him but God is greater than his heart! Francis must translate and in his doing so the Leper’s recrimination turns into remorse and Francis at the same time discovers that his own love had fallen short. The Leper asks forgiveness but more importantly (according to Messiaen, himself) so does Francis (now perhaps we see why only Francis is granted to hear the Angel clearly!). He gives the Leper a kiss and the Leper is miraculously healed. The Chorus arrives from nowhere to sing, in the manner of a Greek tragic chorus, “For those who love greatly, much is forgiven.” All this and more is going on in this libretto, and we might find ourselves paying a different kind of attention than we did last night at La Bohème or even Tannhäuser.

These three Scenes constitute the First Act. In the Second Act (Scenes Four through Six) we move into the Monastery itself, as it is tested by the visitation of a Wanderer who happens to be the Angel. Father Francis, in this second phase of our exposure to him, is now praying in his Grotto, separately from the Brothers. The omniscient Wanderer demurs to disturb him but asks to speak with Brother Elias instead, who is the Vicar and in charge of the place. The Wanderer asks him what he thinks of Predestination, whether he has Overcome Himself, whether he has shed the old man and taken on the New Man. Busy with his institutional duties, Elias has no time for such pertinent questions by this impertinent nobody and sends him packing. But then the Wanderer returns and asks to speak with Brother Bernard. “Oh yes, I have thought of predestination,” says Bernard: “I hope that when I die and I meet my Lord he will ask me whose face he sees, as he asked what face the man saw on the Roman coin, that I might say, “Yours! Yours!” – a stunning recasting of the Gospel passage presented with an unforgettable, yearning dissonance. In the Fifth Scene, the Angel does visit Francis and plays his viol for him: it is a divine message beyond words (so you see what work Messiaen, who considers “divine” something more than merely an esthetic index, has cut out for himself!). Francis swoons and the Brothers come upon him fearing he is dead, but it was the music. If he had heard more his soul would simply have left his body. Having clearly advanced to a more intense, personal, and independent relation with God through music, we find him in the next Scene (Six) walking with Brother Masseo, identifying many of his “brother birds,” with the orchestra calling out their calls to him and him calling them back by name (the scene and the music totally outstrip David’s dialogue with the orchestra when he explicates the rules of Mastersong to Walther in Die Meistersinger, the only thing with which this tour de force could be compared); but the enthusiasm of this dialogue now gives way to a Sermon he addresses to the birds, to thank God for their ineffable eloquence (Can you believe this? you are in a concert hall!), and after a totally silent pause the birds, in the orchestra below the platform, break into an exuberant chaos of song, while Francis and Masseo up on the platform look down onto the orchestra and point out the birds to each other. After a half hour of this Scene and the Second Act is over.

In the Third Act we take what is the culminating step in the “progrès de la grâce dans l’âme” of François, as Messiaen describes the piece – which is also his last: the Reception of the Stigmata (Scene Seven) and his very Death, the transition from the old life to the New Life (Scene Eight). In Seven, Francis has only one more thing to ask for from God, that he suffer the pain and wounds of Christ on the Cross. We are back in Scene One, and thereby now we know the opera will and must end. The wounds he receives, with a menacing percussion reminiscent of the great Hammer in Mahler’s Sixth, but even more of the sound of a dentist hammering a packing into a root canal. I won’t try to describe the music here but can simply say it constitutes the Scene that I am summarizing. Jesus speaks directly to François through the chorus; and the most striking and over-the-top notion we are presented is that in addition to sharing Christ’s wounds, the flesh and blood of Francis will constitute a Second Host. Whether we can grasp this or not, his Death, the “death which comes to all,” now takes place (Eight). The Angel reappears, calling out to him from somewhere among the Elbe-Philharmonie terraces, “Fran…çois! …… Fran…çois! …” – it is a glorious high E, a clarion fifth in A major) to receive him into his New Life, and so does the man who was a leper and since died and went to heaven. Francis bids adieu to all that has accompanied him on his spiritual path: to the Space and Time that gave place to Verna, to the institution of Assisi that “will save many souls,” to his Birds, these interlocutors of his that provide his regular access to the Divine, and to his beloved Brothers – in particular the skittish Leo and the deeply devoted Bernard whom we met at the end of Five. But also, he thanks God “for music and poetry, which have led me to Thee, by image and symbol, and in default of Truth.” The Angel and the Leper he healed by love will now come to his side and guide him into Paradise, where he will hear the divine music that is beyond words, forever.

This is the St-François of Messiaen. The secret working of the piece is that the music be grand enough, and super-luminescent enough, to lead the audience, held by the hand, along the vertiginous ascent of François’s elevation by grace, without their looking down. The orchestra does and probably cannot do this for all. The audience at the first performance thinned out at the last Act but at the last the audience stayed. What is needed is the orchestra’s outlandish and ever-astounding support, never falling behind the heights that his soul and ours with him could reach, never doubting the incredible perspectives we are vouchsafed to glimpse – something Nagano and his orchestra actually provided in this hall on the Elbe, on those three nights.

So much of the singing requires exposed and sustained first-note entrances, both by the Angel and by François. These were executed flawlessly by both, both of them extending their notes with convincing and controlled vibrato, and Nagano holding back the orchestra so as to keep them exposed were necessary. The Leper’s role expresses the greatest spectrum and shift of emotion, very credibly pulled off.

And now for the other part, the visuals, which were meant to expand and reinforce the “shared experience” that Delnon has set out to provide. Such videos are the major staple of the Regietheater movement, which so far at least has left libretto and score unmolested. It is idle to condemn them whole-cloth (though they probably deserve it), but what needs to be criticized are visuals that with their wordless and soundless authority impose erroneous interpretations upon the composition. Thus, we need some criteria by which to evaluate their use.

“Images and symbols,” as Messiaen has François say, have led him to God, “by default of truth.” The great and general version of such an epistemology is what Aquinas called the analogia entis, the ways of finding an inkling of God in his creation, something that goes all the way back to Plato and Heraclitus, at the very least. But it is from the need and the effort to describe some experience of the ineffable that such symbols and images derive their “truth,” their cognitive power – and surely not from some prerogative granted to a Regisseur by an Intendant, authorized by the size of their contract. The artist may demand a prerogative merely on the claim of being an artist, or he may be an artist on the claim that he has the prerogative to wait for the inspiration to arrive, without a guarantee that it will. If the former is cheeky enough, his demands might incite and support a scandal that draws greater audiences than a finer and more subtle director might; and if he is sophistic enough – if, that is, he is adept at feeding back to the audience their own cherished but barely supportable beliefs – he is likely to provide a lesser but more reliable gate. By now it has become perfectly expectable to scandalize the audience by violating conventions in ways that require no creativity at all, just as it has become respectable to insinuate an obeisance to political correctness.

It is the milder of these that is at work in the present production. The do-gooders of Hamburg have really nothing to do with Francois’s ascent through grace. None would choose death over life: it is the volunteer that is the focus of the hospice video, at the end calmly walking home after her client dies and disappears from the bed. The young man (or woman) who plays the face of Sea Rescue 5 is just a young man (or woman) who soon will go off and get a job and have a family, not a monk like Brother Bernard who left the regular world in anticipation of seeing his Master.

The case of the professor of climatology is particularly instructive. He teaches avoidance of what is ugly, while the Franciscan, in the scene with which the professor is associated (the healing of the Leper), learns by loving the ugly and embracing it: that is, he grows by encountering his limitations. This is not to say the climatologist should foster global warning but only that his activity has none of the power that enables a man to desire heaven, after all. When François, at the end of Morning Prayer, focusses his prayer upon the ugly in God’s creation, the video of the professor suddenly shifts from a leisurely walk in technicolor through a verdant forest, to a black and white scene of a forest burnt to the ground. The disaster was not a matter of clear-cutting; are we to assume it was subject to a forest fire caused by a climatological cause?

The First Scene with Leo walking along and disturbed by his fears is paired with a video of one and then two homeless men in Hamburg, the second dressed in the rough hooded robe that resembles the Franciscan habit, as if to suggest these unshod homeless are like discalced monks – but monks live a life in poverty by choice not default or bad luck or addiction – Francis above all, who disowned his inheritance to the great consternation of his rich and prominent father. If the Sea Watch group saving rejected refugees is analogous to Francis embracing a leper, am I supposed to supply the axiomatically progressivist subtext of xenophobia? Meanwhile the video on board their boat pans across a bulkhead full of protest posters, while for Messiaen, “in this dreadful time of crime, terror and murder everywhere, it is up to, and from, one voice, even if so small, to proclaim peace, love, and hope.” He is referring to his lovely birds.

It is true that Francis was a radical and a revolutionary, in the eyes of the Pope at least, but the present story has not to do with that phase of his ministry and life but with his personal spiritual development at the end. The social commentary is just as irrelevant to the theme of the opera as the usual supplements of the Regisseurs, but the pity here is that they distract and even obstruct the audience from recognizing that Francis’s progress is inward, not the abolition or revolutionary “rethinking” of evil institutions “out there.” The model is rather Brother Bernard, pivotal in Scene Four, who leaves society behind, as Francis does in the remaining four Scenes, in his Grotto with the Angel, his Walk and Sermon with the Birds, his Stigmata, and his personal Death.

There is one more striking aspect of this production we have no criterion to evaluate, another aspect related to Delnon’s initiative to create a “shared experience” and the omnipresence of Hamburg in the production. Hamburg, after all, is far from the Mediterranean! Professor Latif holds not a candle to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research Conference two hundred miles to the east, and to be frank, Hinz&Kunzt is a well-meaning but moralistic sandbox. The message that seems to be crying through to us in all this is: “You gotta start somewhere, dammit, and we in Hamburg, not somebody else, are doing what we can, with some verve and creativity!” Signs of life in a world torn by war, analogous to the symbolic importance of the Elbe-Philharmonie itself, standing proud and distinctive on the water of the Hamburg canals, risen out of the rubble of a war as hard to forget as to remember.

This “not somebody else,” fostered by Delnon’s creation of a “shared experience,” burgeons to unprecedented extremes in this production. In the Fifth Scene, “L’Ange musicien,” the Angel will seek out Francis as he prays in his Grotto and will play the wordless divine music for him – as the orchestra at the same time is doing for us. The video begins by trucking down the Angel’s path to the lush grotto below the Monastery, and then blends away to a stately woman playing the ondes martenot, that signal instrument in the apparatus of Messiaen, of which the present orchestra has three and which have been providing the distinctive whoops and warbles in the birdsongs we have been hearing throughout the opera so far. Next we see Kent Nagano himself, preparing to come out of his office to the concert stage presumably to rehearse with the orchestra, and after him we see a young lady rosining the bow of her violin backstage. A moment later, down in the real orchestra arena, a stage hand is placing a music stand and chair to the right of the conductor and a young violinist comes in to join the orchestra – it is violinist in the video, Kathrin Wipfler! This business is very strange but at the same time disarmingly intimate: “In the round,” after all, there are no footlights separating performers from audience – a feeling enforced before by the Angel appearing among the audience in the terraces, hither and yon, and also of a piece with lighting effects we have experienced now and then, with the color of the ceiling or the walls changing to reinforce the ideas and the music in a synesthetic way. Suddenly there are forty or so dancers all in white scattering and flittering among the terraces like birds, keeping us from knowing who is what and leading us even to wonder whether we are really separate from what is going on. We do not feel threatened; it is just a benign suspension of the usual separations. “We” are the “us,” perhaps. The performers are enjoying to perform no less than we are enjoying to watch and to hear them.

And it goes the other way, too. In the video during François’ Sermon to the Birds (Scene Six), Jacques Imbrailo gets into a boat and motors up one of Hamburg’s canals into the country, where he finds a huge oak tree just like the one Messiaen calls for in his libretto for the Scene, and Jacques watches for the birds he is singing to from the platform.

Just to make things blend together still more, the persons in the silent videos are here and there made to lip-synch the most important words being sung from the platform, as for instance Francis’s climactic remark to the Leper at the end of Scene Three, that he had been an inverted pyramid standing on its point (a metaphor Messiaen got from the great but little known author, Ernest Hello): it is the most striking line of the Scene but that hardly justifies its being put it in the mouth of a the Sea-Watch volunteer, who cannot know what it is referring to – unless we conceive that he is somehow in the hall, among us. Such an inkling receives surprising support at the end, when the personages in the videos, the homeless man and that same Sea-Watch volunteer, show up on the gangways and the little platform alongside the performers, and share in the final applause.

For me, and maybe only for me, but strongly for me, the force of all this porosity and all these boundaries coming down, added to the huge spiritual power of the work, was somehow analogous to the spirit becoming flesh – the first half of the miraculous mystery of the incarnation and resurrection, the single mystery behind all that we have heard and seen this evening, though taken for granted in the settled Christian context of the plot. Rather than insisting on the miracle dogmatically, Delnon has made us feel it.

Hamburg will never be the same to me, even though I had never been there before, and maybe to itself as well. I can only hope that I, and it, and all the others, will find ourselves together there, again, for another such fulfilling, redeeming, glorious, and joyful shared event – and that Hamburg reprises this inimitable production soon, in the coming years, for the rest of the world.

Ken Quandt / Chasing the Sun at 36,000 feet above Taloyoak / 10 June 24