Proposal
Abiding Love – a staging of Strauss’ Four Last Songs
(Image: Frans Masareel)
Music theatre / media theatre / live cinema
based around a performance of Richard Strauss Four Last Songs
For Mezzo-soprano, actor and piano
Singer – a younger performer
Actor – an older performer
Domestic objects with cameras hidden inside them
Projection
Strauss’ four last songs are said to imagine sublime moments at the end of life. The first, Twilight, describes one partner leading another through an idealised landscape. This ends with a mysterious transition, as if suspended between life and death, introducing three further songs recapturing their lives together, Spring, September and Sleep.
In this treatment, the couple are played by an actor and singer. The singer has died. The actor is dreaming of their lives together, remembering the partner as a younger person, who sings the Four Last Songs, leading the actor to their own final moments.
Setting is the present. A living room with pictorial wallpaper and mementos, ornaments, photos – a personal shrine which the songs bring to life, observed by live small cameras hidden in objects.
Twilight
The singer (S) and actor (A) beside each other on a sofa, wallpaper behind. The rays of a setting sun fall through a window, finding the actor who sleeps. The singer reaches out and touches them.
S surveys objects on shelves, mantelpiece, TV, windowsill – derived from images in the song – two china birds, a painted plate depicting sunset.
Musical transition. S stands, sensing something behind her, and turns. The wallpaper reads as a landscape.
Spring
S looks at the sleeping figure, then at drawings of them entwined, and the story of their youthful obsession.
S attention switches, gathering small things in the room together in pairs and clusters, making ‘couples’ and ‘families’ of objects, photos, plants in pots.
This aligns with cameras to create a scene like an ornamental garden.
A wakes.
September
S appears to enter ‘garden’, placing the two china birds on a bird table. The image is elaborated in the song – a late summer garden beginning to ripen and fade.
A photo of this garden, this time with the younger couple in it, sitting on a bench. The old actor beholds the younger couple, who returns the gaze.
Sleep
S encourages A to stand. Hand in hand they see the surfaces of the room, with its pictorial wallpaper, gently fall away – revealing a more distant view of the same unfolding wallpaper horizon, on another surface.
They look at each other, then back to the view. Now they/we see drawn versions of themselves as they are now, and will be, placed at ever more remote points in a still landscape, until the last, tiniest figures appear to be at the top of a remote hill, at sunset.
END
This envisages a mostly B/W visuality in projections, using colour only sparingly.
One source of inspiration is Frans Masareel‘s woodcuts
Tim Hopkins 2016
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