"GURU"
AN OPERA COMPOSED BY LAURENT PETITGIRARD
Libretto by Xavier Maurel based on an original idea of the composer
State Commission OSF Productions Publisher
Recording for the label Naxos in October2010 in Budapest, music director Laurent Petitgirard
Stage director Daniel Mesguich
Music director Laurent Petitgirard
The members of a sect lead reclusive lives on an island under the influence of Guru, their master, to whom they have entrusted themselves and their possessions as well as the task of guiding their lives. With Guru are Marthe, his mother, Iris, a now abandoned adept with whom he has had a child, and also Victor and Carelli, respectively the ‘financier’ and the ‘scientist’ of the organisation.
Guru wields total authority over his disciples, who are scrupulous in their adherence to the rules of life he has prescribed. They are weakened and fanatical, and their only food is derived by Carelli from sea water, a preparation that is supposed to lead them to ‘transparency’, the ultimate stage of sanctity before the ‘great journey’ (death, of course).
When the opera begins, new adepts have just arrived on the island. Among them is Marie, who holds herself apart, keeps her eyes open, and, above all, refuses to sing with the others (this is a speaking role from start to finish). She openly declares to Guru that she has “come to destroy him”.
Guru, self-confident to the point of insanity, willingly sees Marie as a trial that has been sent him, and Marthe and Victor are astonished to notice that he has now come to believe in his own power and in what for them is just a ruse intended to delude simple minds.
It is in this context that Iris’s child, who had been declared sacred by Guru – and who, as such, had been wasting away in the sect’s sanctuary, a veritable living icon receiving scant nourishment – shows signs of being at death’s door. Under Marie’s influence, the troubled adepts seek to oppose Guru’s will and attempt to save the child. When it dies, Guru sends them back, brilliantly using Carelli’s fantastical theories as the basis of an electrifying speech.
The event is, however, a catalyst. Guru declares that the ‘great journey’ must wait no longer and fixes it for the following day. He orders everyone to make ready and prepare themselves for what will be nothing less than a huge collective suicide.
Iris, alone and in despair after the death of her child, is the first to commit suicide, thus managing as it were to escape from Guru’s influence. Marthe and Victor, by now appalled at Guru’s delirium, try to resist his plan, not having thought it would ever concern them. Yet the first dies by the hand of Guru himself, while the second is left to be lynched by a barbaric mob of frantic adepts.
Everything is ready for the tragic denouement, and all are about to drink the potion prepared by Carelli, supposed to enable them to meet again in purity in the spheres. Marie still wants to avoid the catastrophe, and Guru’s final challenge is to tell her that if she finds a single adept who refuses to ‘leave’ with the others, he will renounce the ‘journey’ for them all. As he foresaw, she comes up against the stubborn refusal of every adept, and all drink what is quite simply poison. Racked by unbearable pain, the adepts die one after the other as Guru heaps insults on them, commanding them to show themselves worthy of the election of which, by this act, they are the objects.
Guru and Marie now confront each other amid the final death rattles. Before himself drinking the poison, he predicts that Marie also will follow them, the last yet the most precious of the converts. After the death of the mad master, Marie is left alone, prostrate with horror, gazing at the poison…
(english translation : Jeremy Drake)
Sound clip
Sound clip
Titles
Timing
Acte I scène 3
Marie : Sonia Petrovna, actress
Guru : Hubert Claessens, baryton
Orchestre MAV (Budapest)
Conducted by Laurent Petitgirard
