ACTEON AND PYGMALION

At first glance, the two one-act operas that you will be hearing today seem to have very little in common, aside from the fact that they were both written by French composers. The first, Actéon, by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, performed for the first time in 1684, begins as a light-hearted work called a "pastorale," evoking nymphs, goddesses, and people in a bucolic setting, and ends as a gruesome tragedy. Pygmalion, by Jean-Philippe Rameau, created in 1748, is described as an "opéra ballet," namely a lyric drama interspersed with multiple ballet numbers, begins with the hero lamenting his inability to breathe life into the gorgeous statue he has produced and ends in an atmosphere of jubilant triumph.

Yet when one probes beneath the surface, one uncovers remarkable similarities. Both operas were inspired by the Roman poet Ovid's impressive text Metamorphoses, and are linked organically by the same theme of transformation, either in sorrow or joy. The heroes of both operas, Actéon in the first, and Pygmalion in the second, find themselves subjugated by the very passion they had promised themselves to resist. Finally, both works underscore in their individual ways the paradox of opera. It is an art of escalation and magnification which nevertheless reveals, through the incomparable eloquence of music, emotional and spiritual truths about our human condition. I'd like to explore the two works with you from this perspective.

We will have a fuller appreciation of the miniature tragedy that the opera Actéon is if we place the work within the French literary context of the late 17th century when Marc-Antoine Charpentier composed it. Outstanding writers like Mme de Lafayette in her novel La Princesse de Clèves and Jean Racine in his play Phèdre depicted sensual passion in terms remarkably similar to the ones used by the composer. It is as though the same cultural DNA was circulating silently among the finest French artists of the time. For them, passion represents a fascinating yet very dangerous elemental force. It swoops down on its unsuspecting victims with a devastating swiftness. It plunges their souls into chaos. It feeds off their flesh and blood; and yet it acquires an autonomous existence within them that compels them, often without their being conscious of what they are doing, to submit to its tyrannical rule.

In Racine's play, Phèdre, just as in Charpentier's Actéon, it is the very act of seeing the object of desire that arouses passion. At the same time, this act provokes bewilderment and confusion within the individual experiencing the attraction, paralyzing his/her reason and willpower. From the very instant the heroine, Phèdre lays eyes on her stepson, Hyppolite, her fate is sealed. A cataclysm is unleashed within her heart and mind. An internal night descends on her consciousness and blots out the light of her reason. Her sensual passion for Hyppolite becomes a fixation. Allow me to recite the four lines of verse in which she describes the turmoil she is enduring. For sheer musicality, they have never been surpassed, at least for me:

Je le vis, je rougis, je pâlis à sa vue.

Un trouble s'empara de mon âme éperdue.

Mes yeux ne voyaient plus, je ne pouvais parler.

Je sentis tout mon corps et transir et brûler.

Now for my rather prosaic English translation: "I saw him, I reddened, I paled at his sight/ A commotion took hold of my disordered soul/ My eyes could no longer see, I could no longer speak/ I felt my whole body freezing and burning in turn."

This is exactly what happens to the hero, Actéon, in the first opera we will hear today. A young nobleman on a hunting expedition, he had prided himself on being invulnerable to passion. In fact, he despised it as a form of weakness and servitude. He was enamoured of his freedom, until the fateful moment when he contemplated the goddess Diane (Diana) bathing in a secluded stream with her retinue of nymphs. Actéon had wandered away from his hunting companions to enjoy the shade of the forest. He unwittingly comes upon the goddess in her naked splendour. He is transfixed, indeed enslaved by the beautiful vision before him. In her embarrassed fury, Diane resolves to punish him ruthlessly. Actéon protests his innocence. And indeed he is innocent. It was never his intention to peer through the branches and witness the scene. He just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But Diane remains unmoved by his pleading, transforms him into a stag, and Actéon's own hunting dogs devour their master. Thus, in an ironic twist of fate, the hunter becomes the hunted.

A hero is considered tragic to the extent that he is engaged in an unequal struggle against a cruel fate, and remains agonizingly lucid and courageous in the face of his powerlessness. The words Actéon utters as he sees himself being progressively dehumanized by being transformed into a stag underscore his stature as a tragic hero. The heartrending music Charpentier has provided for him intensifies even further the horrid and unjust punishment meted out to him: "What do I see in this liquid mirror?/ My face is becoming wrinkled,/Ugly hairs cover my body/I have practically nothing of my human form/My words are nothing more than an obscure sound/Ah! In my present state, you Gods who created me from the noble blood of kings,/Remove me from the light to spare my shame."

Towards the end of the opera, we discover that the goddess Diane was only the instrument or the "hit woman" in Actéon's death. The order to destroy him came from higher up, from the goddess Junon, or Juno. Outraged and humiliated over having been betrayed by her consort, the god Jupiter, she was determined to wreak vengeance on the whole family of King Cadmus, including his grandson Actéon, because the king's sister, Semele, had enjoyed at one time the favours of the god, as did another relative, Europa. Since Juno could not kill her husband, the ruler of the gods, she could at least annihilate the family of the women who had inflicted shame upon her. This involvement of Juno in Actéon's tragic fate emphasizes even more the vulnerability of the human creature in a universe seemingly devoid of justice. The tragedy becomes almost unbearable when Actéon's hunting companions, unaware of his demise, rejoice in seeing their friend, now a stag, being torn apart by his own dogs. When they finally learn that he has been victimized by the gods, they, too, voice their horror, anger, and sorrow at the idea of living in a world where innocence is persecuted. The music that accompanies their lamentations is deeply moving.

Some well-meaning feminists may want to murder me after hearing what I'm going to say, but I couldn't help thinking that Actéon's horrible death can be viewed as the metaphor for the destruction of the reputation of more than a few blameless men as a result of the Me Too movement. Now please understand. There have been sexual predators like Harvey Weinstein who thoroughly deserved to be castigated and disgraced. But not all men accused by the movement have been guilty of similar crimes. In fact, the reputations of some, including a former professor at UBC, have been torn to shreds, just like Actéon by his own dogs, and undeservedly so. Our own great Margaret Attwood has compared the persecution of these people in the name of a noble principle of justice to the mob violence found in the Salem Witch hunts of the 17th century, the reign of terror unleashed during the French Revolution, and the degradation inflicted on innocent victims when Mao's Red Brigades held power.

Another thought occurred to me when perusing this opera. Actéon's fate is sealed in the name of a sacrosanct taboo: he supposedly violated the private space of a goddess when he dared gaze on her naked splendour. But this taboo is relative to a particular culture. As for Diane's stature as a goddess, anyone who has studied Greek mythology will realize that the gods of Olympus are simply extrapolations of certain human vices as well as virtues. They are more often than not no better than ordinary mortals. In fact, their behaviour can often be much worse. They are capable of committing acts of vindictive, hair-raising cruelty. In this context of Greek mythology in which Marc-Antoine Charpentier's opera unfolds, the hero is the victim of an unjust verdict and is utterly powerless to prove his innocence. In radically different circumstances, Actéon's unintentional transgression would not have been considered a crime at all. It would not even have raised an eyebrow. If Actéon and Diane had by chance been members of the same nudist colony in our 21st century, he could have admired her beauty to his heart's content. In all sincerity, I never could have imagined before studying this one-act opera of a 17th-century French composer that it would be so thought-provoking and relevant to our times.

As we move from the devastating tragedy of Charpentier's Actéon to our second one-act opera, Jean-Philippe Rameau's Pygmalion, the atmosphere lightens considerably. This little gem of a work is life-affirming. It forms a stunning contrast with its predecessor. The story, one of the most famous in ancient Greco-Roman mythology and literature, deals with a sculptor who has fallen desperately in love with the statue of the divinely beautiful woman he created. He yearns to bring this inert matter to life, so enamoured is he of his creation. Suddenly the god of Love, Amour, descends from the heavens and transforms Pygmalion's work of art into a live human being. The former statue, now vitally alive, declares her love for her creator. The God of Love's retinue, "les Grâces," or the Graces, initiates Pygmalion's ideal companion into the art of the dance, and Amour invites the people to join the sculptor in celebrating his new-found happiness. Naturally, Pygmalion's former girlfriend, Céphise, is understandably indignant at being ditched for a woman with whom she could not possibly compete. But we can hope that the god of Love will make her sadness vanish by finding her a new romance. And so the opera ends with general rejoicing.

Opera's detractors could point to this extravagant story to justify their criticism of the art form. Two of Jean-Philippe Rameau's British contemporaries were probably thinking of works just like his when voicing their contempt for the genre. Dr. Samuel Johnson branded opera as "an exotic and irrational entertainment, which has always been combated and always has prevailed." Lord Chesterfield was even more excoriating when he rejected it as "essentially too absurd and extravagant to mention." Yet this is precisely why opera continues to thrive. It excels in depicting not what we are, but what we could be if we were ever able to go to the full extent of our wildest yearnings, longings, and aspirations.

In other words, an opera like Pygmalion holds up to us not a mirror where we can see our everyday personalities faithfully reflected, but a magic, aggrandizing one where finally our most secret, sometimes repressed tendencies can expand, untrammeled. Aided and abetted by the visceral intensity and immediacy that only music can bring to the expression of our deepest emotions, opera encourages us to suspend our disbelief and enter into the exciting and sometimes frightening realm of dreams. In the case of Jean-Philippe Rameau's Pygmalion, we are in an atmosphere of joyous wish-fulfillment: a statue representing an ideal of feminine beauty becomes a live human being and returns the love of its creator. As though in anticipation of this fanciful, extravagant dream coming true, the overture suggests the sculptor's use of the chisel and the rhythmic hammering effects that amplify as the music unfolds.

This apotheosis of love and beauty clamours for the participation of the ballet. Indeed, in Pygmalion dance is an integral component of Rameau's artistic vision. The composer described his opera as an "acte de ballet," meaning a short work bringing together spectacle, music and dance around a plot inspired by mythology and driven by the emotion of love. In our modern times, we consider it perfectly normal for dance to be organically integrated into the plot. Some of Broadway's greatest musicals like Carousel, Oklahoma, and West Side Story have been brilliantly successful in using dance as a means of moving the action forward. But in the 17th and 18th centuries, this collaboration between dance, plot, and music was quite an innovation. I will endeavour to show, when discussing this short opera, how the three work together to make the story come alive in a powerful way.

Unlike the hero Actéon of the first opera, Pygmalion does not appear carefree at all when the curtain rises. Actéon prided himself on being unassailable as far as passion was concerned. In very buoyant spirits, he was looking forward to a continuation of the hunt, and many more to come. Pygmalion appears disconsolate, distressed because he finds himself subjugated by the very passion that he, too, had taken pride in shunning. He is lamenting the loss of his once cherished freedom. As he sings in French, "Fatal amour, cruel vainqueur,/Quels traits as-tu choisi pour me percer le coeur." (Fatal love, cruel conqueror/What darts have you chosen to pierce my heart?)

Yet there is an essential difference here. Far from being smitten by a hostile goddess and being condemned to a tragic end, Pygmalion, as a sculptor, is vanquished by his own creation. His indifference to passion resulted not so much from a fear of losing his freedom as from a yearning for the kind of perfection and uniqueness that no living woman could possibly embody. In this respect, he resembles other great artists whose dissatisfaction with the status quo impels them to create grippingly original works. Pygmalion's beloved, in the form of a statue, represents the tangible realization of an ideal of beauty so sublime that nothing earthly can rival it. His sorrow, then, at the beginning of this opera, stems not so much from being enslaved by passion as from his agonizing awareness that his love for an inanimate object cannot ever be reciprocated. His fixation is based on an ideal of esthetic beauty that nothing earthly could ever measure up to. His girlfriend, Céphise, ends up seeing through him. Outraged, she accuses him of being a pervert. She realizes that she cannot compete with a dream of aesthetic perfection.

Only divine intervention, then, in the person of the god of love, Amour, can effect the transformation of a statue into a living, breathing, human being who can return Pygmalion's ardent sentiments. Amour is the supernatural power that instills throbbing life into inert matter. So far, despite our marvellous technology, we haven't reached this stage yet. If this day ever comes--and being rather pessimistic about the mess mortals can often make when they endeavour to transform matter--I fervently hope and pray that the purely human creators of life will show the same wisdom as the god of love in this little opera. As Pygmalion emphasizes in his virtuoso and jubilantly triumphant arias that bring the work to its conclusion, Amour exists to bring mortals happiness. This is his raison d'être. Hence the glowing tribute that the hero pays the god after his adored statue miraculously comes to life.

Through his wonderfully evocative music, the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau traces Pygmalion's emotional trajectory from despair to unbridled joy. In the very first scene, Pygmalion voices his helpless anguish. But in Scene 3, his emotions move from G minor to G major, as he travels from the deepest sadness over his inability to make his creation pulsate with life, to astonishment when his dream becomes a reality. And they culminate in a radiant E major when his beloved statue, now vitally alive, returns his love unconditionally.

The opera closes with a "divertissement," or balletic entertainment. This is perfectly logical within its framework. The dances flow organically from the story and represent its culmination. After coming to life, it is only natural that the god of Love's helpers, or Grâces, initiate Pygmalion's beloved into the intricacies of the human emotional network so that she may enjoy a full flowering of her humanity. After the god's charming ariette "Jeux et ris qui me suivez" (Games and mirth that follow in my footsteps), the Graces draw Pygmalion's beloved into a series of dances that run through the gamut of tender feelings. As they succeed one another, the listener perceives through the music the newly awakened woman's consciousness expanding, and we can sense that she is even experiencing eroticism pulsating through her body in the very sensuous and mysterious Sarabande in the key of F minor. Just as music represents sound in movement, dance is the exteriorization of this movement in tangible form. The more Pygmalion's beloved participates in the dance, the more she discovers her human potential for pleasure.

As the curtain falls on the second of our two short French operas, we can reflect again on the paradox and power of the art. Opera thrills us because it uses fancifulness to take us to a place where we hadn't been before. It conjures up our deepest emotions with a sharpness of focus and stunning relief that compels us to view them as though they were entirely new. Detractors of the art have dismissed it as an escape from reality. And in a way it is. Nevertheless, this is the kind of escape that invites us to turn inward and thus enables us to better understand who we are as human beings. A statement my late mother once made seems so appropriate here. When I was very young, way back in the previous century, I once asked her why most of the leading actors and actresses in Hollywood movies were so handsome and beautiful. I pointed out that in ordinary life this was not so. And she replied, "Why shouldn't they be beautiful in the movies? We have more than enough ugliness in real life!" I couldn't have said it better myself.