Pascal Dusapin - Il Viaggio, Dante, at the Paris Opera's Palais Garnier

ONP Garnier, Paris, Wednesday March 26, 2025

Conductor: Kent Nagano. Production: Claus Guth. Sets: Étienne Pluss. Costumes: Gesine Völlm. Lighting: Fabrice Kebour. Video: Roland Horvath/rocafilm. Electroacoustics: Thierry Coduys. Dante: Bo Skovhus. Virgilio: David Leigh. Giovane Dante: Christel Loetzsch. Beatrice: Jennifer France. Lucia: Danae Kontora. Voce dei dannati: Dominique Visse. Narratore: Giovanni Battista Parodi. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

Photos: © Bernd Uhlig/Opéra National de Paris

Pascal Dusapin is probably better known in France and Belgium than elsewhere, though his Faustus, the Last Night (2006) premiered in Berlin. But like me, he’s getting on for 70, and Il Viaggio, Dante, first performed at the Aix festival, in the summer of 2022, is something like his tenth opera, depending on how you classify his works: he apparently calls this one an ‘operatorio’. It’s the fourth I’ve seen, and browsing back through my posts, I find that various things I wrote about the first three are relevant to Il Viaggio as well. For example, on the subject of Macbeth Underworld, ‘The work overall might seem more oratorio-like than obviously operatic.’ I could, as you see, easily recycle some of these past remarks here, a fact I’m happy to take as indicating a certain degree of consistency on both his part and mine.

As a glance at a list of his works will show, Dusapin isn’t shy of taking on big themes: the myths of Orpheus, Medea and Penthesilea, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, Faust and, more than once, Dante. He and his faithful librettist, Frédéric Boyer, have based Il Viaggio not only on the Divine Comedy, but on La vita nuova as well, condensing it all to just 110 minutes, in a prologue and seven tableaux: Le départ, Chant de deuil, Les Limbes, Les neuf cercles de l'Enfer, Sortir du noir, Purgatoire and Paradis.

Again, referring to Macbeth Underworld I wrote: ‘director Thomas Jolly was involved from the outset in the creative process, making it something of a Gesamtkunstwerk in a virtuoso production.’ Much the same can be said of Il Viaggio: composer, librettist and director have obviously collaborated closely once more to create a work in which words, music and action cleave to each other like the pieces in a puzzle.

Funnily enough, more than once, when ruminating on Il Viaggio as I struggle to describe it, I’ve thought of Richard Strauss, not for any musical reason, but because the plot, if such it can be called, brings to my mind both Tod und Verklärung and the Four Last Songs. It deals, as a dying man’s past flashes before him, with journeying through the personal hell of loss, grief and pain, eventually coming to terms, as best we can, with the finality of death, and possibly, when it comes, welcoming it. ‘A journey both dreaded and hoped-for,’ as the librettist himself put it in interview. 

Before opening up progressively - as if advancing, curtain after curtain, through Dante’s concentric spheres - into the spartan, abstract space of the inner world, the imagination, Guth’s staging is bookended by reality. At the beginning we watch a black-and-white film projected on a pale curtain, in a shade of green that will run through the production and that, in the circumstances I'm on the point of relating, might be called ‘nosocomial’- a clinically wan sort of colour reminiscent of hospital wards and institutions (though also, come to think of it, of Prada shop interiors). In the film, Dante, already agitated - or drugged, or drunk? - drives chaotically, on rough tracks, through a forest at night. Distracted by startling visions of Beatrice in his path, he crashes.

We next find him, battered and bloodied, in his drab, Florentine flat. Is he already dead, or bleeding to death? Does what happens next happen over time, or in a flash? We don’t really know and perhaps it isn’t essential. Here we meet the characters who will appear to him or travel with him on his journey through hell: Beatrice, more an icon than a developed character as such, in red; blind Lucia, in a glittery black cocktail dress and halo-like headdress, stumbling forward with one arm outstretched; Dante when young, in a neat, dark suit; tall, straight-backed Virgil, Bible black.

Forest and flat will both reappear at the end of the production, when Dante is finally - if I stick to the Straussian motif - transfigured. In between, after the walls of the apartment have slid aside, the abstract, imaginary world beyond the curtain has the feel of a nightmare circus or TV show: circus, perhaps inspired by Dante’s circles; or show, maybe with ‘Commedia’ in mind.

What, when I was a kid, we used to call a TV ‘compere’, in a sparkling white dinner jacket and glittery red shoes, introduces each tableau, declaiming Dante’s texts in the original old Italian. We advance first into Limbo, a kind of waiting room painted that pallid, nosocomial green - you can almost smell a hospital corridor - where people of all ages, from an old woman on the left to two sinister little Diane Arbus girls on the right, are lined up, all dressed in white, on chairs against the wall. While projected shadows suggest the movement of a metro train - this is, after all, a journey - the seated figures jerk into frenzied spasms. We will meet them all again, next time dressed in black.

Microphone in hand, the compere announces the circles of hell. Our guides, a couple of grinning assistants of the kind who help magicians or acrobats, hold up placards with the relevant numbers. The Voice of the Damned - the appropriately-cast Dominique Visse - is a demented, demonic hag in a red dress: Beatrice’s monstrous, mocking, chain-smoking double. (I’ve noticed that cigarettes, now hardly anyone smokes any more, have recently become a directorial fad.) As the chorus wails, Dante’s young double re-enacts Beatrice’s entombment in a neon-trimmed grave and those Limbo/subway figures reappear, the dead or dying Dante staggers, in torment, through his trials. Shafts of golden light appear from the right (same side as the window of his flat), and extras-cum-dancers are drawn towards it, through billowing clouds of stage smoke, as if by a magnet.

The walls of the flat close in again (with more video projections) and Dante is at last reunited with Beatrice: Paradise.

The production is meticulously directed, lit and performed. I have, of course, only sketched it summarily, but various video clips from both Aix and Paris, available online, give an idea of the overall aesthetic, along with snippets of action. The demands on the singers are considerable, and mostly well met - though in fact, not everyone actually sings as such.

The so-called Narratore announces more than he narrates, and though the excellent bass, Giovanni Battista Parodi, sings Italian repertory staples at La Scala, his job here was to declaim relevant selections of Dante’s original verses. Similarly, Dominique Visse’s part, as the voice of the damned, is all wild, shrieking and cackling Sprechgesang, something he has always done, as a ‘character countertenor’ with innumerable Arnaltas and Nutrices under his belt, very well.

As Virgil, the young American bass David Leigh doesn't really have the chance to develop a character, but nevertheless brought striking stature and dignity to his hieratic role.

Christel Loetzsch is a mezzo I’ve seen several times already in Brussels, first of all, as it happens, as one of the Three Weird Sisters (sic) in Macbeth Underworld, and more recently as Flosshilde and Rossweisse. As the young Dante, she gets some of Il Viaggio’s more lyrical writing to sing (there were fleeting moments when I imagined I’d heard phrases quoting Puccini). She was remarkably convincing, physically and vocally, as a youth, but not always audible enough over the orchestral and electroacoustic substrate.

The two sopranos - both of them, on occasion, launched into the stratosphere by Dusapin - fortunately contrasted well - and could reach all the notes. Danae Kontora’s voice is rather dry and wiry up there. Jennifer France’s is rounder and juicier. Though, obviously, a key player, she doesn’t get a great deal to sing, spending much of her time on stage simply advancing in stately fashion in her red dress, drawing on her cigarettes: an icon, as I said above, more than a developed personality. But her final, writhing, rhapsodic arioso (if that’s the term) was pretty magnificent.

The Dante of Il Viaggio is an agonised, tormented character. If age - compounded perhaps by his enduring commitment to taxing contemporary roles of this kind - is inevitably taking its toll on Bo Skovhus’s voice, wearing away the lower half, it doesn’t really matter. The top half remains valiant, and his performance overall was a gripping tour de force of tragic acting. It dominated the show.

Regarding the score, I’ll resume my copy/paste quotations… Of Penthesilea I wrote, in 2015: ‘Dusapin’s score is of course, in the circumstances, not what you might call easy listening; but it is by no means intractable (...) the chorus, commenting on the action from time to time, was haunting.’ All this is still true of Il Viaggio.

However, after his Roméo et Juliette, in 2008, I noted ‘his music has a definite form and is clearly going somewhere,’ which is less true of the current work. In Il Viaggio, the chamber orchestra, sharing the pit with that haunting, 24-voice chorus, delivers a slow-moving, lava-like flow of sound, a dark-hued substrate supporting the singing. It shifts, it heaves, it swells, it groans, sometimes it rumbles (there’s an organ), sometimes it shimmers (there’s a glass harmonica)... All of this is kept transparent, legible, firmly in place by an attentive, expert Kent Nagano, who premiered the work in Aix.

Dusapin generally avoids repetition, so there are no easily-recognisable forms, learnable motifs or noticeably sustained rhythms: the music relies more on its meandering harmonies, often quite tonal-sounding. There's certainly no foot-tapping rumty-tum or post-romantic swooning, so Carmen and La Bohème are safe. Dusapin himself said, in one of his interviews, that his music for Il Viaggio is more contemplative than before. It takes time to settle into the slow rhythmic pulse. Eventually, it becomes hypnotic, and you’re gripped.

But this is, I think, opera for people used to a lot of opera, people with the regular opera-goer’s ironclad buttocks and copper-clad bladder, inured to grinning through Parsifal and bearing it. It won’t become a popular hit. A number of people crept out after the first half hour, something I don’t remember ever seeing before.

However, those that stayed on, after the (disgraceful) disturbance, till the end applauded the cast (Skovhus especially, of course) the conductor and the composer, who was present, loudly and long. A taxing evening - you wouldn’t have wanted it to run over two hours - but a satisfying one.