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The story of the award-winning Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit with Buenos Aires it has encounters and disagreements. His first visits were over sixty years ago, as an instrumentalist, as a conductor, and as the husband of pianist Martha Argerich. The relationship of the Argentine actor and stage director Alfredo Arias with this city is like that “Nocturno a mi barrio” by Aníbal Troilo (“I never left my neighborhood, I’m always arriving”) or an example of Cortázar’s story the other sky, which connects the Güemes gallery in downtown Buenos Aires with Vivienne in Paris. He has been living in France for more than fifty years, and with several decorations from the French government (Order of Merit, Knight of Arts and Letters) he feels that his comings and goings across the Atlantic are something natural in his long career . In Buenos Aires he lives in an apartment in Barrio Norte. He is close to the one that Charles Dutoit had until five years ago and decided to sell. Surely they do not know that detail about each other, but this does not matter. Today, the neighborhood they share is the orchestra pit and the stage of the Colon Theaterbecause they are in charge of the next operatic premiere of this season, The Rake’s Raceof Igor Stravinsky.
At the beginning of the new century, Dutoit directed two titles of the Wagnerian tetralogy at the Colón, but the remaining two were never performed. Problems and more problems. That perhaps affected the relationship with the theater. However, at the behest of his daughter, Annie Dutoit Argerich, the bond was woven again a few years ago. In addition, although they were married for barely five years, she maintains a great friendship with Argerich. For that reason she shares the work. She conducts concerts at the Argerich festival, in 2022 she participated in The soldier’s storywhere his daughter also had a role, and in August he will conduct Arthur Honegger’s oratorio Joan of Arc at the stakewhere there will also be stories from Annie.
Arias, for his part, strengthens a relationship with Colón that began in 2001, when he was called upon for the first time to stage The Rake’s Race. It could be said that since it is a title that he has already made and with the presence of Dutoit, a great specialist in Stravinsky’s music, quality would be assured. However, since it is Stravinsky, the public might want to be surprised by a new version, or not?
Dressed in a shirt, jacket and cap with a visor, Dutoit walks his 86 years of age nicely through the corridors of the theater until he settles into a box for the talk with Arias and with LA NACION. He says that his Spanish is limited, but he is friendly and absolutely willing to chat, which, by the way, he cultivates in Spanish with excellent fluency. He even sometimes declaims in a lively cocoliche, due to the fact that in academic music there are words of Italian that are very installed. “No, not surprising, in the case of this classic work”, assures the director. Arias says that he only wants to excite the public: “Surprising is more of a game of chance. Emotional yes, because the work has moments of great poetic amplitude. Possibilities to excite there “.
Then Dutoit’s voice appears again to take an X-ray of this story so closely connected to Faust, to The soldier’s storyalso by Stravinsky, and that human being tempted by the devil, which in this case is expressed in the life of a man (Tom) who abandons the love of his life (Ana) for the most mundane pleasures that the devil offers him ( Nick).
“When it was released [en el Teatro La Fenice de Venecia, el 11 de septiembre de 1951] critics wrote nonsense. They talked about a Mozart pastiche. No: Stravinsky is a classical composer in the sense that he is not involved in the work. Romanticism is different. At that time the composer and the interpreter were involved in the work. Stravinsky is a classical composer since the end of the First World War. Why? Because after the First War there was a new thought. There was a cataclysm in terms of religion and philosophy. In Paris there were two or three movements. Dadaism, for example. Or the return to the Greek in art. In this sense it can be mentioned Apollo musagete y King Oedipus de Stravinsky, Fr Antigone, from Honegger. When Stravinsky went to America there was another cataclysm in his music. Another way of thinking. It happened in other places, with other composers, like the movement of Boulez and Stockhausen, in Darmstadt, who thought that the past was something dead and had to start with something else. Stravinsky no. Rake’s Progress (Rake’s Race) it is pure Stranvinsky. And he never did a pastiche. Yes, there are quotes in some of his works and that is fine ”.
Many people say that Dutoit understands Stravinsky’s music like few others. What is he related to? What is the secret? With the experience. That is the director’s blunt response. “More than sixty years ago I had to prepare The soldier’s story to conduct it at the Geneva Conservatory. More than sixty years ago it was something very difficult for me. Now it’s easy. Then they told me to run the fire bird and it was another event. The only thing I didn’t direct from Stravinsky was his twelve-tone work and the last thing he wrote. Everything else, yes. And I met him, in 1959, in New York.”
Although well known, this is an anecdote worth hearing first hand, in his own voice; even more so when he is about to direct The Rake’s Racein Colón and, later, The wedding, at the Argerich Festival. “In 1910, Stravinsky lived in Switzerland, because there were very good sanatoriums there and his wife was very sick. He stayed there where he ended Spring consecration y Parsley. In 1914 the Great War came and instead of returning to his country, he stayed in Switzerland. He moved to Morges, a small and beautiful city where I currently live with my wife. Now we are going to do The wedding because it is the centenary of the premiere of this work in Paris. When I saw him, he was rehearsing precisely this piece, in New York, in 1959”.
It is a work with four pianos. For each there was an American composer. In the first, Aaron Copland; in the second, Lukas Foos; in the third, Samuel Barber and in the last, Roger Sessions. Dutoit, who was a student of Foos’s, had come to rehearsals to turn the page of the score. “During intervals, while everyone went to have coffee, Stravinsky stayed at his lectern. I would go talk to him because he loved speaking French. He was happy to speak French. Ten days we talked about many things. It was an incredible experience. He made records with his music, not just concerts. That is, in conclusion, not a special talent but my experience”.
-Alfredo, having put on this play more than twenty years ago, in this same theatre, what are the differences with the current version?
-I always let myself be guided by the phrase of the French writer Margarite Duras. “I don’t go to the opera much because there are many things between me and the music.” And sometimes a lot of matter is developed between the essentials, which is music. Many want to take the writing of the work and anyway, it is the music that always wins the battle. I tried to go more inward. To think that Nick Shadow is the inner voice of Tom Rakewell; as if he were the voice that gives us the option to make mistakes in life. Do this in a stripped down manner. Music, alone, drives you.
-If it is a more interior look, perhaps the idea of a Fausto move to the Dr. Jeckyll y Mr. Hyde.
Arias: -If it can be. Although I do not know if it is fully realized. Let’s say it’s the idea that led me. The interesting thing is that Tom Rakewell is not a headless fool. He is a fool with emotion. We could all lose ourselves in life as he loses himself.
Dutoit: -He is going to London, to…
–Brothel.
Dutoit: -Can you say quilombo? [se ríe]
Arias: -[sonríe por la ocurrencia y asiente] If possible.
Dutoit: -Well. He gets lost, but he always thinks of his Ana. And an interesting thing about eighteenth-century theater is that they used to invent surnames that were the description of the character’s character. Rake is the libertine; Shadow, the shadow and Truelove is Ana, true love. The soldier’s story It also has to do with this. Mephistopheles is the one who exchanges life for fortune.
Arias: -In this play there is a rather conceptual love that the character does not give up: Ana’s voice in her head. The work is absolutely moving and with a goldsmith’s musical virtuosity because its brightness changes like a precious stone. The arias are sinuously mesmerizing.
Duos: -And there are, in the text, things of English poetics that are difficult to understand for a foreigner. It took me a long time to understand it.
Arias: -I was lucky that this work was proposed to me with this script. If they proposed it to me, it will be that at some point in my life I did something good. There are many opera scripts that are outdated. And sometimes one wonders, why am I doing this?
-Did it ever really happen to you to ask yourself something like that?
Dutoit: -I am 86 years old. Many times I have found a problem to grow. To understand things that one does not understand. This is a very difficult profession. You have to study a lot to discover what you don’t know.
How is working with your daughter?
Dutoit: -She has had an interesting life but it was difficult with parents in this career. It’s hard for a girl to find her way. But she has a fantastic education, a Ph.D., she teaches at the University of Phoenix, and currently she has a career in this as well. She works with her mother. And with me, in Switzerland and here.
-And now prepare the Joan of Arc de Honegger.
Dutoit: -Yes, and it is a difficult job. Now we are going to start it. He will do it with two fantastic actors from Paris. We will have rehearsals with them and with the orchestra. She is very intelligent and cultured. Also, she is nice. [se ríe]
-Alfredo, does life for so many years between France and Argentina give the feeling that one is always arriving or leaving?
Arias: -Throughout the years, at one point I began to feel that, except for the thirteen hours on the plane, I was in continuity. A door opened and I was in Paris, another opened and I was in Buenos Aires. I have not suffered. And I don’t have any criticism to make every time I arrive in Buenos Aires and they tell me: ‘you saw what happens with such a thing’. I wish I could enjoy this time and get more in touch with my roots, if there is anything left to discover.
