In his short story, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), Dostoyevsky portrays one of these half-crazy people typical of his universe, a delusional and prophetic character who tells in the prologue to anyone who wants to listen how desperate and on the verge of suicide, he was saved by his chance meeting with a little girl in distress and then how, following an initiatory dream, he decided to accept his status as a ridiculous man. It is from this data that Sébastien Gaxie (composer) and Volodia Serre (librettist and director) imagined their opera, the essence of which is concentrated in the dreamlike plunge of the hero into a utopian universe, a sort of ideal double of the ours where lives a humanity steeped in benevolence, goodness and faith which he will gradually pervert by his example.

The musical style of the composition is characterized by a generalized polyphony, in the choral writing of course, entrusted to this sect of “humans”, embodied by six soloists from the Musicatreize ensemble, who expresses themselves in the Hopi language, but also on an orchestral level where the eight instrumentalists of the 2e2m ensemble constantly interact. The result is work on very elaborate ensembles that is truly captivating. The title role itself does not escape this rule since it is split into two voices, those of the actor Lionel Gonzalez and the baritone Lionel Peintre (both remarkable), which sometimes exchange in the spoken register and sometimes unite in an authentically lyrical speech. For just over an hour of beautiful density, the viewer is transported into a dimension whose strangeness, more comical than disturbing, captivates thanks to the subtle work on a remarkably integrated soundtrack. Transmuted by the video of Benoît Simon and Stephane Lavoix, the modest stage setup in which the protagonists move is transformed into a lunar landscape which adds a cosmic touch to the whole and reinforces the exotic and hypnotic character induced by the music. Was it the presence of Lionel Peintre who was one of the chosen interpreters? The style of the work is reminiscent of the research of Georges Aperghis and the musical theater of the 1970s and 1980s because here too the music of the language seems to condition the musical invention and the use of the voice of the protagonists also played an important role in the composition process. One of the main merits of this atypical score is its immediate accessibility, ultimately proven by its unanimous success with the audience at the premiere. A great success both theatrically and musically
Quoted from https://www.musicologie.org/

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Modern Opera

FULL Je suis un homme ridicule (Sébastien Gaxie) Paris 2017 Lionel Gonzalez, Lionel Peintre

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