Het Klankcafe: Andriessen, Caso and Keesmaat about Anais Nin & Odysseus’ Women

Anais Nin DVD Release

Anaïs Nin in Utrecht Tonight

Two more performances of "Anais Nin": tonight at Vredenburg Leeuwenbergh Kerk in Utrecht, 20.00h, and tomorrow at Den Bosch Verkadefabriek, 20.30h within November Music festival.

Anaïs Nin Review

Frits van der Waa, exclusively for this blog, reports about Amsterdam performance of "Anaïs Nin":

The Dutch premiere of Louis Andriessen's Anaïs Nin was presented Thursday night in a crowded Muziekgebouw - which may be the result of the composers' appearance, the day before in the prime time show De wereld draait door. The new monodrama was performed by ensemble Nieuw Amsterdams Peil, who opened the program with Martijn Padding's Mordants en Guus Janssens Hu Hu Baley - excellent music and on a par with LA's work.

The book of Anaïs Nin is culled by Andriessen from Nin's diaries and from writings by Antonin Artaud and René Allendy, two of her lovers. She reminisces about her affairs, notably about her incestuous relationship with her own father, the composer Joaquín Nin. The role of the slightly vapid Anaïs fits Cristina Zavalloni, Louis Andriessen's muse since many years, like a glove. The only props are a chaise longue and a tea tray. Furthermore, director Jeroen de Man, added a video screen, where we can see snippets of Anaïs's past, with spoken quotations. But the audience cannot be swept away by this, because at times the 'tape' is spooled back and forth by Anaïs. In the beginning there is some interplay between music and video, but after some time the music takes over.

The score is certainly among Andriessen's finest, although the piece is at most 45 minutes long. The texture and vocal lines hark back to M is for Man, Music, Mozart (1991), but over the years Andriessen’'s style has become more supple and versatile. Helped by the 8-piece ensemble, fine musicians such as reed players David Kweksilber and Michiel van Dijk, pianist Gerard Bouwhuis and violinist Heleen Hulst, the composer suggests small orchestral miracles. At the same time, the music contains subtle traces of older music, like Weill's songs from the thirties, or American fifties' jazz. Beneath the surface, there's a lot going on, such as the wobbly, but nonetheless sure-footed octave jumps.
 Aided by the amplification, Mrs Zavalloni gives a powerful performance, although her voice isn't particularly beautiful and sometimes has a grating effect. The good thing is that the music is not 'expressive' in the classical sense, but rather straightforward, sung declamation - which doesn't prevent Andriessen from slipping in howling 'seufzers' at the great melancholy climax.
This music is thoroughly theatrical, and Andriessen employs a lot of time-honoured tricks. The most overt one is also the most effective: In the last minute the musicians stop playing, and we hear, far off, a melancholy song, accompanied by a muffled instrument - a guitar, a harp, a piano? It's an old song by Joaquín Nin, Anaïs father and lover, and it has a melancholy Andriessen probably never could have realized by himself, but which is so strongly reinforced and put in perspective by all what went before that it has become an integral part of his composition.

(The photo of Cristina Zavalloni as Anaïs Nin from the world premiere in Siena)

Anais Nin, Dutch Premiere

During my recent stay in Amsterdam I made a photo of the poster for Andriessen's "Anais Nin" that will have its Dutch Premiere on November 4th, 8.15 pm. at Muziekgebouw aan het IJ. It will be performed by Cristina Zavalonni and Nieuw Amsterdams Peil ensemble. 

In the meantime, you can read interview about the piece with the composer.

Cristina Zavalloni as Anais Nin

Anaïs Nin Libretto

"A desirable but insustainable emotional state brought on by extreme excitement and some form of mystical expectation". This was how Peter Greenaway defined ecstasy in "Rosa, the Death of a Composer". It appears that the ecstasy was one of the main motors for "Anaïs Nin", both the person and Andriessen's newest piece of music theatre. Andriessen himself created the libretto that brings evidence of ecstatic moments Nin had with Antonin Artaud, René Allendy, Henry Miller and her own father, composer Joaquin Nin.
"Even when I possess all – love, devotion, Henry, Antonin, Allendy – I still feel myself possessed by a great demon of restlessness driving me on and on. I am rushing on, I am going to cause suffering; all day I feel pushed, pushed.
I cover pages and pages with my fever, with this superabundance of ecstasy, and it is not enough. I pace up and down the cave. I have Henry, and I am still hungry, still searching, still moving – I cannot stop moving.
Only Henry senses the monster, because he too is possessed. I too will leave a scar upon the world." (...)

This is how "Anaïs Nin" begins, by Nin's own words taken from one of her interviews. Few more excerpts from the libretto illustrate Nin's passions:

(Anaïs Nin)
"Artaud – the face of my hallucinations. The hallúcinated eyes. The sharpness, the pain-carved features. The man-dreamer, innocent and diabolical, frail, nervous.
“Je suis le plus malade de tous les surrealistes.”
I was haunted by Artaud.
I met Artaud at the Viking. I was trembling. And then began a night of ecstasy. We left the café, we walked in a dream, in a frenzy, Artaud torturing himself with mad talk about eternity, God. We kissed violently; an ecstasy. He said: “Mon amour, mon grand amour! Entre nous il pourrait y avoir un meurtre.” (...)

(Anaïs Nin)
First day of Father story. King Father arrives after conquering a paralyzing lumbago. Pale. Suffering. Impatient to come. He appears cold and formal. He conceals his feelings. His face is a mask.
He talked about his love affairs as I do, mixing pleasure with creativity, interested in the creation of a human being through love. Playing with souls. And I watched him. And I knew he was telling me the truth, that he was talking to me as I talk to my journal. That he was giving me himself. This self was generous, imaginative, creative. And at certain moments, inevitably untrue.
Meals were brought to the room. I wore my satin negligee. The hours passed swiftly.
Then he said, “You are the synthesis of all the women I have loved. I don’t feel toward you as if you were my daughter.”
“I don’t feel as if you were my Father.”
“What a tragedy. What are we going to do about it? I have met the woman in my life, the ideal, and it is my daughter! I’m in love with my own daughter!”
“Everything you feel, I feel.”
There was a long silence.
Father asked me to move nearer. He was lying on his back and could not move.
We kissed, and that kiss unleashed a wave of desire. And when his hand caressed me – oh, the knowingness of those caresses – I melted. With a strange violence, I lifted my negligee and I lay over him.
“Toi, Anaïs! Je n’ai plus de Dieu!"
My yielding was immense, with my whole being.
(...)
Resources:
Anaïs Nin: Incest. From A Journal of Love. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers New York, San Diego, London Copyright 1992 by Rupert Pole All rights through: Gunther Stuhlmann.
Antonin Artaud, Oeuvres, Lettres à Juliette Beckers et Anaïs Nin. Édition établie, présentée et annotée par Évelyne Grossman, Éditions Gallimard, 2004.
René Allendy, L’Amour, Éditions denoël, 19, rue Amélie, 19, Paris VII, 1942.

Anaïs Nin World Premiere Photo Log

Sara Ciccarelli sends photos from the world premiere of "Anais Nin" opera. The performance took place on July 10 at Teatro dei Rozzi in Siena as part of Settimana Musicale Senese.

Cristina Zavalloni as Anais Nin, Teatro dei Rozzi, Siena, Italy

Photo by Pietro Cinotti

Cristina Zavalloni as Anais Nin, Nieuw Amsterdams Peil ensemble, Teatro dei Rozzi, Siena, Italy

Photo by Pietro Cinotti

Opera Anais Nin, Nieuw Amsterdams Peil ensemble, Teatro dei Rozzi, Siena, Italy

Photo by Pietro Cinotti

Cristina Zavalloni as Anais Nin, Teatro dei Rozzi, Siena, Italy

Photo by Pietro Cinotti

Cristina Zavalloni as Anais Nin, Teatro dei Rozzi, Siena, Italy

Photo by Pietro Cinotti

Anaïs Nin Synopsis

Festival "Settimana Musicale Senese" begins today in Siena, Italy. Andriessen's new piece of music theatre "Anaïs Nin" (2009/10) will have its world premiere tomorrow at Teatro dei Rozzi. This monodrama opera is based on texts by Anaïs Nin and commissioned by the Accademia Musicale Chigiana of Siena and by the London Sinfonietta. Performers are Cristina Zavalloni, soprano, and Nieuw Amsterdams Peil instrumental ensemble. Interestingly, Andriessen will have his debut as a film director with the film that is incorporated in the piece.

Here is the synopsis and history of the piece written by Louis Andriessen:

Anaïs Nin Synopsis


I await my father with deep joy and impatience.

My Double! My evil Double!

Anaïs Nin


Anaïs Nin is a ‘monodrama', a musical stage play for one voice (Cristina Zavalloni), an ensemble of eight musicians (unconducted) on stage, and projected film fragments. The voice, Anaïs Nin, sings of her love affair with her father, the composer and pianist Joaquín Nin, whom she meets again after an absence of twenty years. Her lovers, René Allendy, Antonin Artaud and Henry Miller, get their word in both on film and on tape, recorded by the expressive singer Han Buhrs. These films are a compilation of existing material as well as new fragments.
The piece opens with a short TV-interview with Anaïs Nin, in which she says that she is forever restless, feverishly excited, and that nothing will satisfy her. ‘Only Henry senses the monster, because he too is possessed. I too will leave a scar upon the world.'
We see Anaïs Nin and Antonin Artaud making a romantic walk. On stage Nin sings of her ‘night of ecstasy' with him.
Then we see a film of someone making a speech and we hear René Allendy, Anaïs Nin's psychiatrist, talking about jealousy. She sings about her affair with him and of Artaud's criticism of her behaviour. Artaud: ‘What have you done to Allendy? You have done him harm.'
Following this Anaïs Nin sings about her renewed meeting with her father (film images). She is interrupted by a furious Henry Miller, but continues her story about the relationship with Joaquín. After a dramatic climax she phantasizes in a letter to her father about a moment of great peace, while sitting on his bed.
Later, in the room where Henry Miller lies asleep, Anaïs sings of her loneliness and perpetual hunger.
As the piece comes to a close, a recording of Joaquín Nin’s arrangement of a Basque Christmas carol is heard off stage, a gramophone disk from the thirties.

History of the piece
I knew about the father Joaquín Nin before I heard about the daughter Anaïs, because my father’s sheet music collection contained piano pieces and an arrangement of Spanish songs by the then famous pianist and composer Joaquín Nin. Only later, in the sixties, an American diary author became famous, mainly because of her sexual frankness. After some investigations she turned out to be the daughter of the composer. Again much later it became clear to me that she had had a love affair with her father.
After many years of intense collaboration with the Italian devil’s artist Cristina Zavalloni I realised that she would be very well suited to do the role of Anaïs Nin. In the meantime the volume of her diaries about the contact with her father had been published unabridged in English under the title Incest.
A few years ago two of my best friends, Gerard Bouwhuis and Heleen Hulst, had started a new ensemble, called Nieuw Amsterdams Peil (‘New Amsterdam Water Level’), consisting of some brilliant solo musicians, who decided to perform 20th and 21st century music for roughly 8 to 12 musicians, especially the more complex pieces, without a conductor.
All these things together opened the way for me to make Anaïs Nin. Reading the diaries from the years ‘32-‘34 I learned that this father was only one of the lovers amongst several others. This lead to my decision to grant an (outsider) role to three of them, namely the French film actor, poet and playwright Antonin Artaud, the American alcoholic turned into a writer by Anaïs Nin: Henry Miller and René Allendy. Artaud, under psycho-medical treatment himself, soon discovered Anaïs’ erotic hunger and advised her to consult his psychiatrist. Not much later this Allendy could be counted amongst her lovers.
The choice of instruments was influenced by the time of writing of the chosen diary fragments (early nineteen thirties). This explains the use of saxophones, clarinets (Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins) and percussion (drumset including hi-hat, guiro, etc.).
The music closely tracks the irony, despair and passion of this many-sided and brilliant woman.

Louis Andriessen

Andriessen in Conversation about New Work “Life”

"Life" by Louis Andriessen with video by Marijke van Warmerdam is going to receive its world premiere by Bang on a Can All-Stars ensemble for which it was written on March 22 in Milan. Andriessen explained in program note “(...) We decided to make a kind of contemporary “Pictures at an Exhibition”: short pieces of music to accompany video clips. This resulted in Life -- four short compositions which combines late romantic ‘European’ music with hip ‘American’ repetitive music. This combination is stretched by the use of cross-references, parallel with what happens in the four films: every film is completely independent, but contains allusions to the others”.
In recent conversation Andriessen evokes his latest collaboration with Marijke van Warmerdam.

Marijke van Warmerdam, Lievelingsmuur (The Wall of Preferred Things, 2000, Collection Louis Andriessen)

Jelena Novak: You mentioned that “Life” is like contemporary “Pictures at an Exibition”?

Louis Andriessen: Marijke found it difficult to think in time. A lot of visual artists don’t know how to handle the fact that things have duration. I said “I can understand it very well so why don’t you forget about time and I will take care of the time”. I think that at earlier times we also talked about narrativeness in art, that is something that interests me very much in the last ten years, specifically because of the vocal music I write. That is the situation with the famous Mussorgsky piece. Of course it is about paintings but the paintings seem to make you think of a story. And that is very interesting in between time and static situation of the visual arts. Four films are quite different and there are cross references through the films. It is more or less the same which I did in the music too. There are memories from earlier pieces in later pieces, but the four pieces are quite different, like a movies.

JN: Did Marijke first made videos or you worked in parallel?

LA: We talked about it a lot and then she had a sort of synopsis of the four movies and she had even no idea which order she would like them. I think she was earlier than I was, starting to shoot things. I remember taking my car to the forest where she made the second one. She used crane because there is an old couple on the bench sitting and looking over the little lake. You see them from the back, than you go up, like an angel, and then you go down again, and the camera moves under the bench, turns around and comes out of the bench, then you see the couple in front and then the camera goes very high up like you are an angel again, turns around in the air to arrive at the opening position. It makes a large circle. For moving under the bench she needed some hi-tech computer animation, because it is totally impossible, it is quite amazing.

JN: You have wall painting done by Marijke van Warmerdam. I remember seeing it on the postcard.

LA: It was a present from my friends for my sixtieth birthday, to paint one of the walls in house in France. It is called “Wall of preferred things”. She had the list of my preferred this and that, and made a choice of four of them, which was: favorite pet – two cats, favorite vegetable was garlic, favorite transport medium was a little step bicycle that children use, and favorite animals were birds – a large parrot. Few days ago when I had dinner with her we had a discussion because I said I call the picture fresco, than we looked in Wikipedia and other places when you can call wall painting a fresco. During our absence the neighbors found out that the part of the ceiling was broken and fell on my desk and on the piano. After a while they found on the floor, in a bin, a dead rat! The rat made a sort of jump from the roof and ceiling and fell down. While repairing that, they have hurt the fresco and Marijke is coming with me in late April to the house to repaint it. Now the part is painted white and it is really like the fresco because all these beautiful Giotto’s and stuff in Italy are also partly completely white.

JN: Would you like to discover some of the musical references you use in “Life”?

They are not quotations. They are what I call allusions. I start with late French romantic melody for the soprano sax. So, Evan Ziporyn does not play on his clarinets and bas clarinets (in the last part he plays clarinet, but he changes it into soprano sax). This melody is sort of remembered during the second and third movement but most of the first and second movements are sort of American repetitive musics. In the second part it starts to become what I call more human. That means that there are harmonic changes and melodies that have to do with French late romanticism. It is basically about those two things, except for the third film in which you only see window blinds, and from time to time hand moves over them to change a little bit a position. That whole part is an imitation by the group of sort of the sound that you could imagine that would be heavy metal material. It’s kind of really live sound but it’s very evident that it’s not synchro at all. It is a kind of musical interpretation of what you see. That works very well. In that part there is no connection with the other three. Of course there is in the film. I don’t follow the cross references at all because the last film starts at the window of nineteenth century country house or so. It has been hot inside, so there is steam on the window, you can’t see through. At the certain moment when the camera zooms in, than you see a hand again to clean the window, and then you can see outside, than it takes some time to focus on what you could see in the far away, you see the same old couple sitting and watching over the lake. So there is allusion on film number two. Somewhere there I start again with the melody we have heard in the first part. Sounds all very classical, but I find it rather good I must say. The combination with the film is quite interesting.

JN: And the very title “Life”?

LA: That was the long discussion with Marijke. We have talked about Steam, because of the steam in the last film. Then she came up with Life which I didn’t like, and said that I will change one letter and make it Live – I think of it as something that you should play live with, like we did before, the first collaboration we did was on version of "Passegiata". But she didn’t like that at all, and so it became Life.

JN: Life is a kind of very important word, it’s not a kind of allegory of life?

Marijke thinks that it is the main subject of the movies. I said - my dear, than every movie should have that title. As far as I know, except for the American magazine, it is not very much used title at all. Then I said ok, let’ do it.

JN: Musically it is your further exploration of ‘lukewarm waters of romanticism’, as you once said.

LA: “Anaïs Nin” is a kind of final step. I can’t go much further from what I did in "Anaïs Nin". Probably I have to move forward now towards new directions.