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Chandos
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Thérèse
Raquin
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Tobias
Picker (USA,
b. 1954) Tobias Picker's tragic opera Thérèse Raquin is based on Émile Zola's grisly tale of a pair of lovers in working-class Paris who murder the woman's husband and are then consumed by guilt. Zola wrote in the preface to his novel that 'I had only one desire… to uncover the animal side of them… then throw them together in a violent drama and note down with scrupulous care the sensations and actions of these creatures. I simply applied to two living bodies the analytical method that surgeons apply to corpses'. |
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'The novel', Picker says, 'exudes "opera" from every page. Everything about it is operatic.' But his approach is very different from Zola's chilly detachment. 'I felt myself becoming involved in the characters' intense emotions. I viewed them not as "corpses" but as real people with extremely serious conflicts. For me the "animal side" of the characters is what makes them so deeply human. I wanted them to be as sympathetic as possible and the audience to feel sorry for these troubled people and to identify with them.' When Picker chose Thérèse Raquin he picked a story in which the dramatic struggle could be bound up with a simultaneous musical one. In the first Act, a harmonically and rhythmically familiar world is always on the verge of tearing itself apart, and finally does. In the second Act, which traces Thérèse and Laurent's descent into guilt and despair, the musical world has shattered and battles constantly to restore itself. |
