LA PASSION D’ADONIS
50′ – 2015
musical & stage performance
La Passion d’Adonis
Would the drowned be afraid to get wet? (Al-Mutanabbi)
If the soul of man hesitates between suffering and boredom, the poet Adonis and the composer Zad Moultaka have chosen their way. But this is a joyous and angry suffering. The same stake, the same passion animate them: to question Arab modernity. If violence and language are inextricably linked, we must question the origin of this violence, we must exhume the encrypted rests in the white islands of collective memory. Find the place of a modernity that feeds and transcends on the energy of the past.
Storms on the Euphrates, and in Aleppo
savagery
Byzantine sword and Arab blood
Arab sword and Byzantine blood
Game
And the dice are the heads
“The poet walks in the darkness, the only condition for surging of the poetic word”. It is in this dark that literally plunges us the composer Zad Moultaka to join and be within the poem of Adonis, guided by al-Mutanabbi (915-955) in his exploration of the Arab language violence, as Dante was by Virgil, visiting hell and paradise.
Zad Moultaka, through this new radical experience, crosses the confines of the language and the music, reconstructs this human night with four musicians and a soundtrack, a bandwidth of time and night. Twilight to welcome, to envelop the word, a word that seems to come from the night of time and at the same time explodes in our daily life such a cruel acuity.
Where Zad Moultaka proposes to restore this word in the clean space of contemporary Arabic music. Oriental instruments – violin, oud, percussion -, language, sounds, accents, heterophony. The interweaving of the poet’s deep and spectral voice with the singer’s living voice or those of the instruments brings out a music unfolding through a game of appearances and disappearances of the musicians on the stage space. A polyphony of the poetic and musical space is born which opens a form of contemplation, a stay in apnea, a waking dream, a complaint, a song of mourning, a vigil and love.
O night! open up, not like a grave
But like a bed
Stay away, never come back
When it flows in the river of our desires
The beauty
Never come back
set
1 soprano, 1 oud, 1 percussion, 1 violin
grosse caisse, tam, vidéoprojector et diffusion sonore
NOTE OF INTENT
“Some musical works are created in deep pain. This is the case of “crossing” which did not find its final title but at the end of the writing; “The Passion of Adonis”. For it is indeed a Passion that suffering steals over our beings, plunged in the words of this immense poet and thinker.
Deep pain because how and why to put into music this poetic language already so powerful and so musical? Any object that comes close to a light source creates shadows! But these shadows are scattered over a path that has become a path of initiation, in a hidden darkness, like a chalice, a glimmer ready to emerge.
The word of Adonis is strong and without mercy, it crosses the space and the time in star spinning towards its black horizon. Approaching it is getting burned. The only way out for music is to become a showcase; here the poet is a soloist and the musicians his desert ghosts, those dead who are haunting the poet by their inability to die.
It is through the essay “the fixed and the moving” that I met the poet Adonis. After long years of work and reflections on my identity and my Arab and Mediterranean cultural origins, this word appeared on my artist’s path as a deep and powerful radiance. For a long time, I thought I was moving in a desert, questioning the memory of yesterday and today, confronting me with dead ends or issues of possible paths as a composer but especially as a man inscribed in a modernity and a political and sociological complexity.
The thought of Adonis has given birth in me an unexpected presence, unexpected because it summarizes in a precise, sharp and enlightened the current Arab problematic, and therefore gives an invaluable key of understanding. But beyond the historical and philosophical aspect, the thought of Adonis is totally visionary.
It fits in a fair and terrifying way in the violent news of the Middle East. When I immersed myself in reading the collection of poetry “Al Kitab”, I was convinced that it was a desperate voice, refusing the horror that pervades Syria today. But “Al Kitab” was written twenty years ago and the poet’s voice is “unfortunately” intact.
And it is a voice that must be heard: shouted, amplified, howled, today more than ever, in the face of inaction and ambient comfort, as an act of resistance.”
Zad Moultaka
On texts and with the voice of Adonis extracted from”al-Kitâb” (the book) Livre II, “hier, le lieu Aujourd’hui”.
(Houria Abdeouahed translation).
Singing language: French
Premiere: October 10, 2015
Venue: Ile de France Festival, Auditorium Jean-Pierre Miquel de Vincennes
By: Mezwej Ensemble
Amel Brahim-Djelloul, chant
Rachid Brahim-Djelloul, violon
Yousef Zayed, oud
Claudio Bettinelli, percussions and claviers
October 8, 2015, Meeting with the poet Adonis, Maison de la Poésie – Scène littéraire, Festival Ile de France
March 11, 2016 GMEM Auditorium des ABD Gaston Defferre, Marseille avec la voix d’Adonis, Amel Brahim Djelloul, Mezwej ensemble
March 24, 2016 Festival Les Détours de Babel, Grenoble with la voix d’Adonis, Hasnaa Bennani, Mezwej ensemble
January 21, 2017 Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris avec la voix d’Adonis, Amel Brahim Djelloul, Mezwej ensemble
March 18, 2017 La Comédie de Clermont with la voix d’Adonis, Hasnaa Bennani, Mezwej ensemble
March 24, 2017 Théâtre de La Spezia (Italy) with la voix d’Adonis, Amel Brahim Djelloul, Mezwej ensemble
Commissioned by Mezwej
© ŠamaŠ éditions musicales 2015
Lamentazioni – Concerto Soave & Mezwej
BaroquinadeS – 02 March 2017 by Jean-Stéphane SOURD DURAND
« La Passion d’Adonis », a syrian voice La Croix, 22 March 2016, Marie Soyeux
La nouvelle passion des Passions Le Figaro, Thierry Hillériteau, 24 March 2016
La Passion d’Adonis, oratorio pour une Syrie en ruine Libération, Frédérique Roussel, 22 March 2016
A la Spezia, Zad Moultaka apre una finestra sulla notte araba
L’Avvenire, Alessandro Beltrami, 22 March
Est-ce le texte qui porte la musique ?
L’Orient le Jour, 10 October 2015, Zeina Kayali
France Musique Les Lundis de la Contemporaine
2 May 2016, le reportage de Pierre Rigaudière
