Let’s lie Genesis: in the beginning was the crime. Without the guilt, without the disobedience, the redemption is impossible. The man comes out of childhood and enter the world of choice, whether it is good or bad. For our ancestors is absolute, that’s how it all starts: Eve led Adam to bite the apple ; Cain kills his brother Abel. Crime runs in the vein of this family the original, which is at the very source of our identity. Without them, without their evil actions, we would still be playing among the ferns and the cubs. But they wanted to know the taste of the forbidden by opening the cabinet to the jams: and so was born mankind.
founding Myth of western culture, this “first homicide” has not often been exploited in the imagination theatre. Is it by a bad conscience, as if we still felt guilty? It is in all cases one of the many reasons that should push our curiosity to go and taste this Primo Omicidio ovvero Displayed, , which is an authentic discovery.
Super baroque
Created in Venice in 1707, this oratorio is part of the pyramid-shaped corpus of Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725). When one contemplates the magnitude of such a work, it is still pensive: 115 operas, 38 oratorios, 100 motets, 820 cantatas, not to mention the chamber music and works for keyboard. The fertility of the musicians of the age of the baroque is striking, and one wonders sometimes if they were not supermen. Reassure us by telling us that the time was not the same, and that some parts were necessarily interchangeable. Still, Scarlatti is an essential pivot in the evolution of western musical, in that it is legitimately considered, by the structure of his works, their daring, as one of the main precursors of Mozart. It must also be the father of Domenico, left, also, a monument impossible to circumvent: his 555 sonatas for keyboard. We don’t have guarantees of course, not only the resurrection of the Primo Omicidio, on the stage of the Palais Garnier, is going to be an epiphany, but one is entitled to hope for much.
The chief René Jacobs remains one of the most purpose “exhumeurs” of the baroque repertoire, as he deals with this mixture of respect and force that made its leg. But it is also the set design of Romeo Castellucci, which promises to be intriguing. The spectators parisians will remember, no doubt, of his superb Moses und Aron by Schoenberg, who had marked the arrival of Stéphane Lissner, at the head of the Opera (remember the huge golden calf, on the stage of the Bastille!). The Italian director seems, therefore, a subscriber of the Old Testament, since it is in charge of putting in images, that is not true, not an opera, but an oratorio. Eden, when you hold us…
Il Primo Omicidio, Opéra Garnier, Place de l’opera (Ninth).Tel.: 08 92 89 90 90. Dates: 22 jan. to the 23 feb. 2019 to 19: 30. Tickets: from 25 € to 185€.
