Visualizing the Music

Abstract

One of Canada’s most famous opera productions recently returned to the stage of the Hummingbird Centre in Toronto after an eight-year odyssey of touring that has brought the Canadian Opera Company acclaim from critics around the world. First mounted in Toronto in 1993, Robert Lepage’s staging of Bluebeard’s Castle and Erwartung has travelled to New York, Edinburgh (where it won the prestigious £50 000 Scotsman Hamada prize for drama and music), Melbourne, Geneva, Hong Kong, Vancouver, and Cincinnati. As is by now well-known, Lepage bases his theatrical creation on the use of “resources,” ranging from pieces of text to familiar objects to artistic images in other media. What is striking in his stage direction of these two short operas, restaged for this production by François Racine, is the way Lepage treats the music itself as a resource. In this staging it would seem that the musical patterns of the score guide the creation of a series of visual images much more than do the verbal signs of the libretto. The result is a complex presentation of visual and aural images that strikes the audience as fantastically original without ultimately challenging the rather traditional messages of these psychoanalytically inspired operas.