ZAJAL
57′ – 2010
opera
Zajal
Zajal is a form of popular poetry and Mediterranean jousting that has existed since the dawn of time. For the Lebanese composer Zad Moultaka, it is a memory that goes back to the lost evenings of his childhood where this shared poetic form was practiced in villages, in the mountains, often broadcasted on national television. In this universe where poets compete, each supported by his clan, it is the talent, the imagination, the virtuosity of the protagonists and the enthusiasm of the public who designate the winners.
From this ever-living tradition and the fascinating story of one of those particularly memorable evenings, Zad Moultaka weaves the fabric of an opera in which language and language intertwine in a strange dramatic game. The booklet tells the story of the early twentieth century Chahrour el-Wadi young man gone on an adventure for a few years and returns, masked, challenge his father, creating a deliciously dynamic and virtuoso exchange. It is a modern Zajal that is proposed by the composer who questions the collective memory and asks the question of the relationship between tradition and modernity, reflection on popular roots, as well as the possibility of a form of Arab opera.
Accessible, funny, nostalgic, poetic, it is also a vibrant and modern homage to the tradition of zajal …. This tribute is particularly evident during the second act in which the appearance and disappearance of the faces and voices of Zaghloul el Damour, Khalil Rouzouk, Zein Sh’eyb and others are poignant testimony to the composer’s admiration for these wonderful poets.
Zad Moultaka, believes to read in the living tradition of zajal, a combination of multiple modes of expression including a form bringing together poetry, music, improvisation, scenography and writing. In the state of intuition for years, this idea was confirmed by the reading of an anthology of zajal “Le diwan du Chahrour”, published in 2000 by the son of Charhour, Nabil el Feghali (Ed.Joseph D. Raidy , 2000) Zad Moultaka uses texts in dialectal Arabic in their richness, their sonorities, their internal rhythm, … It is in a completely acrobatic and virtuoso way that the two protagonists of the opera, the extraordinary actor Gabriel Yammine and the sublime singer Fadia Tomb el-Hage happily engage in this jousting and allow the theatricalization of the zajal, give it all its dramatic and musical mean.
SYNOPSIS
The story takes place in the early twentieth century in the small village of Wadi Chahrour, in the region of Baabda, rich in olive trees and poets and famous for its oratorical contests. The priest Louis el-Feghali, his real name Khalil Semaan, a great zajalist, one day receives the visit of a strange personage. A young man with a masked face comes to challenge him. Priest Louis, stunned by the audacity of the stranger, accepts
The village gathers, one stands on the big place the tables for the jousting. The audience settles with arak glass and some mezzes. Poets go up on a platform. At first, the priest puts the young man to the test, giving him rhetorical constraints more and more difficult to assume. But the young man is virtuoso, he gets away with it brilliantly, and turns out to be great among the big ones. He combines poetic dexterity with an extraordinary voice and commands general admiration. Nahfétak chahrouryye (You flirt like someone Wadi Chahrour !!!) says the priest. After a moment of rest, the game resumes, the tension increases, the crowd is almost in a trance.
The young man will discover himself. It is actually the son of the priest, gone long ago for The City and gone since. Assaad el-Khoury el-Féghali, will obtain his “diploma” of a poet, and it will be repeated for a long time that he is the one who “bewitched the Arabs” …
Arab chamber opera
According to the transcription of a play between Khalil el-Khoury el-Féghaliet, Assaad el-Khoury el-Féghali (called the Chahrour)
Singing texts and recited in Lebanese dialect Arabic – Subtitles in French
Premiere: April 22 & 23, 2010 at Poitiers TAP national scene music
scenography and staging Zad Moultaka
Booklet “The hidden treasure”, transcription of an evening of zajal, Lebanon 1909
In The diwan of Chahrour, text established by Nabil el Feghali, Ed. Joseph D. Raidy, 2000
Pronunciation of Joseph Abi Daher
with
Fadia Tomb el-Hage, contralto
Gabriel Yammine, actor
ars nova instrumental ensemble
saxophones: Joël Versavaud and Jacques Charles
horn: Patice Petitdidier
trumpet: Fabrice Bourgerie
trombone: Patrice Hic
snorkel: Philippe Legris
percussion: Isabelle Cornelis
Philippe Nahon: musical direction
Conception video and editing by Zad Moultaka
Production Ars Nova instrumental ensemble
Coproduction TAP – Scène Nationale (Poitiers) / Gmem, centre national de création musicale / Art Moderne
With the support of the Cultures France and the Spedidam
April 27, 2010 La Coursive, La Rochelle by Fadia Tomb el Hage, contralto and by Ars Nova instrumental ensemble, direction Philippe Nahon and the participation of comedian Gabriel Yammine
April 30, 2010 Les Musiques Festival La Cartonnerie Friche La Belle de Mai, Marseille by Fadia Tomb el Hage, contralto and Ars Nova ensemble, direction Philippe Nahon and the participation of comedian Gabriel Yammine
May 28, 2010 Douai Racecourse, Place du Barlet, 59502 Douai by Fadia Tomb el Hage, contralto and Ars Nova instrumental ensemble, direction Philippe Nahon and the participation of actor Gabriel Yammine
June 8, 2010 Lebanese creation. Beirut Spring Festival, Samir Kassir Foundation. The Baths of Beirut, Lebanon by Fadia Tomb el Hage, contralto and Ars Nova instrumental ensemble, direction Philippe Nahon and the participation of comedian Gabriel Yammine
July 21, 2010 International Festival of Hammamet Tunisia by Fadia Tomb el Hage, contralto and Ars Nova ensemble instrumental, direction Philippe Nahon and the participation of actor Gabriel Yammine
July 24, 2010 Cultural Center Fontevraud Encounters Abbey by Fadia Tomb el Hage, contralto and Ars Nova instrumental ensemble, direction Philippe Nahon and the participation of actor Gabriel Yammine
September 25, 2010 Paris Ile de France Festival by Fadia Tomb el Hage, contralto and Ars Nova instrumental ensemble, direction Philippe Nahon and the participation of comedian Gabriel Yammine
November 12, 2010 Festival of the Arab World of Montreal (Quebec) by Fadia Tomb el Hage, contralto and by Ars Nova instrumental ensemble, direction Philippe Nahon and the participation of actor Gabriel Yammine
April 21, 2011 MC2, Babel Detour Festival, Grenoble by Fadia Tomb el Hage, contralto and Ars Nova ensemble, direction Philippe Nahon and the participation of comedian Gabriel Yammine
March 9, 2012 The Parvis de Tarbes by Fadia Tomb el Hage, contralto and Ars Nova instrumental ensemble, conductor Philippe Nahon and the participation of actor Gabriel Yammine
January 23, 2013 Festival Presences (projection)
March 24, 2013 Jade-La Citerne, Les Baux de Provence (projection)
March 31, 2015 Unesco, Paris (projection) for the entry of the zajal into Unesco World Heritage
March 17 & 18, 2016 Symposium University Paris 8 Saint-Denis, presentation of “Zajal” Arab Opera
arabe
Commissioned by l’Etat français et Ars Nova ensemble instrumental
© ŠamaŠ 2010
credit photo : Arthur Péquin
The zajal
From Zajila: singing, humming, raising your voice, talking high, playing, having fun … and Zajalon: which means the popular dialectal poetry but also the game, the noisy joy, the noise, the din … The zajal is a form of popular poetry that goes back to the dawn of time, and in any case to pre-Islamic times. Social and cultural tradition among the Bedouins of the tribes of the Arab peninsula, in Lebanon he takes his metric in the old Syriac language, it is also attributed a second birth in Andalusia of the eleventh century (it should be his invention to Ibn Quzman, died in 1160 in Cordoba and nicknamed the Prince of Zajal …). Form of oratorical, poetic and musical jousting, perhaps stemming from the tradition of mouwashas, it turned to vernacular languages and spread throughout the Mediterranean basin. It survives today only in Egypt and Lebanon.
Traditional forms of zajal
The “zajalist” builds a quatrain, a rhythmic form. He improvises, he repeats his sentence to give himself time to build the suite; there is here a strict submission to unspoken codes that raises the tension. The listeners wait for the continuation … and the fall: the enunciation of the challenge. When he finished, the percussionists (req, jingles, bendirs) will resume his last sentence, in a form here also very coded, transcribed. It is the closing of the word of the first zajal. The second poet then speaks, and so on … Speaking is always done in these three movements: matla (sending), dawr (turn), qufl (closing). The themes are simple, deal with the political or historical events of the mountain, exhort to attack an enemy, get drunk with a victory … Where it is also question of the love joy, the pain, the mourning, the worries of the everyday life…
The zajal opera
Zad Moultaka, settled in Paris since the mid-80s, has taken the path of musical writing. He tends all his thoughts, even his obsessions, to a place of meeting, or an improbable synthesis. Deeply rooted in the Arab world and Western culture, he seeks in this formula of zajal, so friendly, so popular (and so cultured), a matter to explore in terms of form and writing. An operatic form
He believes he reads in the living tradition of the zajal, a combination of multiple modes of expression including a very archaic form of opera bringing together poetry, music, improvisation, scenography and writing. There is also the echo of various contemporary concerns, whether in the report to the text – at Berio, Aperghis, Leroux, Nono … – that in the current popular musical forms such as rap or slam …
In the state of intuition for years, this idea was confirmed by the reading of an anthology of zajal, published in 2000. The texts in dialectal Arabic are elaborated there in relation to their sound, the dynamics and the rhythmic language, through the arrangement of words, syntactic audacities, lexical choices, hyphenation … These games do not conceal the meaning. There is an acrobatic way of composing and uttering poems, where theatrical realization takes on all its dramatic and musical meaning. Hence Zad Moultaka’s project to enrich his reflection on languages, to work from this specific form to such a powerful character, to explore how far it is possible to bring it to contemporary expression, while keeping the substance, the taste of the language, the atmosphere, the primitive drama.
Opera in 3 acts
• The first act (20 ‘) A character, the father, is on the screen, facing the audience and never leaves it. He attacks. The singer and her musicians, representing the stranger and the villagers, answer him. It is he who revives the dramatic action. We see him sitting, smoking a cigarette, in an attitude of provocation and indifference. Present and absent. A distancing effect. At the end of the act, the priest declares a truce because the poets are tired.
• The second act (12 ‘) gives way to another form of struggle: images arise, made of archives and details – percussion, mallet, rubbing – but they are silent. As if we were in a double space of old and new memories. Like a heterophonic counterpoint between past and present, sonic realities and muted images. The polyrhythm of the image responds to the musical polyrhythm of the musicians. Work on the deep texture of the zajal. Abyss between different layers of the past combined with the dream power of reality. The sleep of the village, like a collective dream …
• In the last act (25 ‘), the story begins again on the place of Wadi Chahrour. It is the act of unveiling and recognizing the son. The image on the screen has disappeared. The presence of the father is signified by electroacoustics and speakers. The game takes on a hilarious and hypnotic party appearance. We are immersed in the crazy atmosphere of the village. As night falls, we enter imperceptibly into the simulacrum …
Note the impertinence of the composer: in Arab and Islamic cultures, female roles are often entrusted to men. Here the composer upsets the norm and sided with inversion. It is a woman with a deep voice, deep and limpid at the same time, who will embody the brilliant Chahrour, whose voice is said to be enchanting … In the same way, the scenic bias of “absent” the father, of to make it exist on a screen or through a soundtrack is also a reversal that allows the Charhour to joust in the open. Here we show what is hidden and we hide what should be obvious.
Perspectives
This dramatization can support several readings: • historical and patrimonial interest of the zajal, the good weather of the poets; • literary interest: the power of evocation of popular dialectal poetry, the art of Arabic metrics; • musical interest – a reflection on the operatic form at the beginning of the twenty-first century … • But also an effective and amusing reading, nostalgic for a bygone era that everyone wears in the memory of his ancestors (because all the popular traditions have an “air of family “) – history of a golden age; • at the same time as a reflection on the Oedipal mechanism, on the archetypes and their contemporary expression where the memory of all the past survives. • More deeply, it is the meaning of Tragic that is explored without concession or sensibility, in the light of a solar work.
