Ca Ira

Roger welcomed the audience in Italian, knowing that English is not "the fine way" here in Rome.

On the other hand, if you enjoy a good story and great music and if you are able to understand most of the words to the songs, you’ll be swept along on a journey that can only be better if you could watch the events unfold on stage.

Listening to an opera before you see it is like listening to a play before you see it. Nevertheless I found by listening to the sound track first, it brings the music to the fore without visuals getting in the way.

An opera based on the French Revolution requires a mighty powerful score and I believe (in my humble and inexperienced opinion) Roger has delivered.

When you hear the first bars of the overture, the distant sound of a dog barking and of calling birds, the Pink Floyd influence is immediately evident and promises an exciting ride.

The overture entitled The Gathering Storm is spine chilling one minute and wildly exciting the next when the music changes unmistakably to the electric atmosphere of the circus ring where the opera takes place; audience and performers changing places throughout the show.

The story is told through music and song using adult and children’s voices, marching feet and drums, explosive canon and gunfire, even a scratching quill.

There are sequences with African music, the fall of the Bastille and an ecclesiastic sequence which all help tell the story of the people’s plight and their desperate struggle for liberty, fairness and justice.

Finally the execution of Louis and Marie Antoinette are carried out and the age old questions are raised again which are still asked today. Is there justification to use violence to achieve peace?

Some words are lost in the very high and very low ranges or when a mob of people are singing but overall the story is easy to follow, forever moving and changing direction and I’d love to watch the opera to tie it all together.

CA IRA

An Opera in Three Acts

by Roger Waters

From the original libretto by Etienne & Nadine Roda-Gil

It is perhaps surprising, given the cataclysmic nature of an event which the historian A.J.P. Taylor referred to as "the end of a world", that the French Revolution has served so rarely, except as deep and obscure background, as a source of inspiration to the great librettists and composers of C19th and C20th Opera. With some little prompting most opera lovers would no doubt be able to cite Giordano's Andrea Chenier as a notable exception to this lapse, but it would surely require an especially devoted aficionado to call up von Einem's Danton's Death and Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites without considerable and prolonged delving. None of these works is universally celebrated by frequent performance, nor do any of them maintain places in one's general awareness of the world of music which correspond to those held, for example, by Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, Carlyle's History of the French Revolution, and Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel in one's general awareness of the world of literature. Perhaps the terror of 1793, with its spies and informants, its executions and imprisonments, subsequently offered so many dramatic possibilities to the creative imagination, particularly in the deaths of rich and aristocratic, and therefore famous people, that it smothered any impulse to depict the ideals and aspirations which initiated the revolution, all too quickly became its only story, and grew overly familiar and exhausted of genuine interest in the process. Whatever the case, one is left wondering at the fact that the epic events of the early revolutionary years, of which the fall of the Bastille and the march of 7,000 bedraggled women on Versailles are merely the best known, as well as the spirit of hope a nd t he w ill for b eneficial c hange w hich i nformed t hem, have so seldom and so perfunctorily engaged the foremost talents of an art form which through its combination of voice, orchestra, and theatre is arguably the one best equipped to present them.

Of course, as we were buffeted towards the close of the last and most turbulent of centuries, our course marked out by relentless catastrophe on a scale previously unimaginable, and beset by political, social, and scientific 'revolutions' so frequent that our capacity for shock, incredulity, and awe was almost entirely dulled, it required some substantial and public reminder of the French Revolution to suggest its distant gestures of dissent as a subject worthy of art, and to concentrate our minds once again on their connection and continuing relevance to us. The celebrations commemorating the Revolution's Bicentennial in Paris throughout 1989 neatly fitted that bill, and in one instance at least acted as a potent and fruitful catalyst for an intense creative effort. The project upon which the respected and successful songwriter Etienne Roda-Gil was working, a nd w hich w as i ntended to have b een included a mongst t he commemorative events, turned out to be a full operatic libretto. Entitled Ca Ira, after the revolutionary song, the manuscript, copiously and beautifully illustrated by Roda-Gil's wife, Nadine, attempted to portray the events and spirit of the revolution's early stage and brief period of accomplishment as they were perhaps witnessed and felt by the many and various participants whose voices struggled to be heard above the tumult of that prolonged and shattering upheaval.

Such topics and themes inevitably attracted Roda-Gil anyway. Bom to a working class Catalan family that escaped Franco's tyranny in Spain by fleeing to France, Roda-Gil inherited his father's communist ideals as well as his rebellious instincts. Powerful elements of both naturally feature in his work, hi fact, his first major success as a 'parolier' was with La Cavallerie, a lyric he wrote for the young Julien Clerc which employed one of the catchphrases of the 1968 student uprising. "Et j'abolirai 1'ennui" (And I'll abolish boredom) was also a rallying cry for the (French) Situationists in whose intellectual and political circles Roda-Gil then moved. The song was a big hit, and began a long though not exclusive collaboration between Roda-Gil and Clerc. Other artists with whom he enjoyed successful partnerships include names as diverse as Juliette Greco and Johnny Hallyday. The most recent of these, however, and the one which continued until his death in May 2004 was with Roger Waters who wrote the rail orchestral score for £a Ira, as well as an entirely new set of English lyrics.

Introduced to the songwriter by a mutual friend, Waters was instantly impressed by Roda-Gil's manuscript. Especially drawn to the subject matter and taken by Nadine's illustrations that provoked a few early ideas for future staging, Waters e nthusiastically embraced the challenge of writing the musical score. This interest and determination were not, perhaps, as surprising as one might at first have thought them to be. Waters' internationally acclaimed work with Pink Floyd, one of whose founder members he was, and whose major creative force he'd been for more than two decades prior to embarking on a successful solo career, has a good deal of the epic about it, and in pieces such as Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall engages similar themes of individual struggle, change, and the need for honesty, truth, and fairness in both our social and political arrangements. Always concerned to increase the impact of his art on his vast audience, as well as to enhance its capacity to entertain, his performances incorporated liberal and imaginative use of theatre. The Wall, for example, brought together narrative^ drama, music and song - precisely those elements which opera buffs would recognise as their own — in a full scale and spectacular 'coup de theatre'.

Working alone in his own studio, and using a string synthesiser to simulate percussion, strings, and brass, Waters quickly produced a rough demo of music in the C19th orchestral tradition on which he also sang the various vocal leads. The tape soon came to the attention of the authorities at the Opera Bastille, the new opera house in Paris, and for some weeks there was talk that £a Ira might very well provide one of its inaugural shows. Despite a personal recommendation from the then French President, Franfois Mitterrand, who had privately heard the demo and publicly expressed his admiration for it, this didn't happen: personnel changes high up in the Opera Bastille's administration scuppered a good deal of its early programming. Soon afterwards the illness and subsequent death of Roda-Gil's wife, Nadine, put the project on hold for several years.

A substantial loose end amongst his creative projects, and one whose further development represented an enormous challenge in terms of (for him) new compositional techniques, Waters was bound to return to it. Re-establishing contact with Roda-Gil in the early '90s, as well as enlisting the help of film score composer and Royal Academy of Music faculty member, Rick Wentworth, he set about refining and extending the early "draft" score of his demo into an authentically monumental and polished work for full orchestra and voices.

At its most optimistic and triumphant, the French Revolution appeared to herald a new age which was to be characterised by a new morality and a new ethical system based on justice, kindness and generosity. In £a Ira Waters and Roda-Gil concentrate on this spirit and use the revolution as a metaphor for the strength and p6wer of human change and growth. As the last line of the English libretto has it: "The promise of the Republic lies within". With thrilling operatic grandeur Ca Ira reminds us all of that promise, and of that hope.

Critic's Notebook - September 28, 2005 When Rockers Show Classical Chops By ALLAN KOZINN - NYTimes

With "Ça Ira," his new opera about the French Revolution, just released on a Sony Classical recording, Roger Waters joins a parade of rock stars who apparently harbor dreams of tuxedos and podiums. Sir Paul McCartney has written a handful of orchestral and choral works, large and small. Stewart Copeland, of the Police, beat Mr. Waters to the punch with his own opera, "Holy Blood and Crescent Moon." Billy Joel has recorded an album's worth of piano pieces, and Elvis Costello, with a ballet behind him, has written an opera as well.

It seems to be a part of the human condition that having established a specialty, we hanker to do something else. And far be it from me to say that we shouldn't. But speaking as a classical music critic who also listens to lots of rock - and who wishes that more rock fans found classical music exciting as well - I must confess that I find many of these crossover incursions dispiriting.

For one thing, rock stars who become interested in classical music are bizarrely conservative. They may play the most electrifying, guitar-thrashing, edge-of-the-seat stuff with their own bands, but when they decide to write classical music, or what they think of as classical music, they reach for a quill instead of a pen. With the notable exception of Frank Zappa, whose reams of classical music reflect his fascination with Edgard Varèse and other modernists, rock musicians seem to think that the conventions of the 19th century are classical music's current language. Mr. Waters ought to have escaped that conservatism. His former band, Pink Floyd, was known for its almost symphonic experiments in timbre, structure and controlled dissonance. Its quasi-operatic magnum opus, "The Wall," was thoroughly Mr. Waters's baby.

Yet the overture to "Ça Ira" ("So It Will Be") is couched in Brahmsian moves and sonorities, and the work rarely lurches forward. A listener soon bumps into orchestral effects that have their roots in Beethoven's "Egmont" or, in more adventurous passages, Puccini's "Tosca" or the Battle on the Ice from Prokofiev's "Alexander Nevsky." Maybe Mr. Waters is mistaken to call this an opera. Yes, there are operatic things about it. The vocal writing is lyrical and often attractive, even if there is little in the way of full-fledged aria writing. There is a hefty amount of choral music, and it is supported by a rich orchestral score. (Mr. Waters had some help in the orchestration from Rick Wentworth, who conducts the recording.) And there are recognizably operatic voices: the baritone Bryn Terfel, the tenor Paul Groves and the soprano Ying Huang each sing several roles.

But if you were to walk into a room in which the CD happened to be playing, you would be far less likely to say, "Hey, it's an opera" than "Hey, it's one of those overblown musicals that have taken over Broadway" - or words to that effect. If you were feeling charitable, you might add, "At least it's a few steps closer to Stephen Sondheim than to Andrew Lloyd Webber" - although if you stay long enough, you'll go back and forth on that one, possibly settling on Claude-Michel Schönberg's score for "Les Misérables."

From a purely theatrical point of view, "Ça Ira" has a few nice touches: not least, the idea of presenting the early stages of the French Revolution as a three-ring circus, with the Ringmaster (one of Mr. Terfel's roles) as a kind of singing history book and commentator. And it deals artfully with serious issues like tyranny, power, liberty and the difficulty of preventing revolutionary passions from being transformed into a form of terror that threatens to negate what has been gained.

No doubt there are some in classical music circles who see a sterling opportunity here, and a decade ago, I would have been one of them. In theory, rock stars who write classical works are telling their audiences that they see something special in this music, something inspiring in the old forms and in the idea of writing for orchestra and unamplified voices. And it isn't unreasonable to expect that a new audience might be enlisted from fans who want to understand what drives their heroes, and who want to like what their heroes like.

When rock fans in the United States bought the first albums by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Kinks, they encountered cover versions of American rhythm-and-blues hits that white American listeners had ignored, and they quickly sought out the originals. Linda Ronstadt's excursions into the worlds of Gilbert and Sullivan and cabaret standards in the 1980's had a similar effect.

But rock fans barely tolerate classical music adventures by the musicians they admire. Sir Paul's fans snapped up his "Liverpool Oratorio," "Standing Stone" and "Working Classical" albums out of curiosity or because they were completists, but you suspect that few who weren't already interested in classical music actually play those discs. When Sir Paul presided over a program of his orchestral music at Carnegie Hall in 1997, the place was packed with people who sought a glimpse of him but who nodded off during the performances.

These crossovers tend not to do well from the other direction, either. Classical listeners find Billy Joel's piano tinkling embarrassing and have been brutally critical of other musicians' efforts as well. They may find it offensive that these musicians can get their baby steps recorded by major labels while trained, experienced, eloquent composers who don't have rock affiliations have to pass the hat.

So here's where rock stars enamored of classical music can make a difference. When they make their first classical albums, they might consider devoting their royalties - a pittance, compared with those generated by their other work - to a fund that would support recordings by actual classical composers.

"Yeah, right," you say, but there is a precedent of sorts. In 1989, Elliott Carter received a telephone call from Phil Lesh, the bassist for the Grateful Dead. Mr. Carter had no idea what the Grateful Dead was, but when he and Mr. Lesh met, the following May, Mr. Lesh brought a stack of Mr. Carter's music, which he knew intimately.

Mr. Lesh, it turned out, wanted to underwrite a recording of Mr. Carter's music through the Grateful Dead's Rex Foundation, which has quietly given grants to other composers as well.

Now that's doing something useful. If Mr. Lesh wrote and recorded an opera, I'd happily give it a spin.