Festival TransAmériques: Hiroshima mon amour, the opera

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The 1959 film, Hiroshima mon amour depicts the brief encounter between a French actress and a former Japanese soldier, whose family perished under the bombs. Writer Marguerite Duras and director Alain Renais invoked love, death, war and reminiscence in what is considered one of the vanguard productions of the French New Wave. In her introduction to the published screenplay, Duras wrote that it was an allegory, the material of an opera. It is this idea that Australian composer and writer Rósa Lind grasped onto for her five-act, one hour and twenty minute opera written for chamber ensemble.

Christian Lapointe, general and artistic director of Quebec City’s Théâtre Carte Blanche, wasted no time in obtaining the rights to Hiroshima mon amour, and then began to develop the structure of the opera. As early as 2013, he had already been in dialogue with Duras’ work in L’homme Atlantique (et La maladie de la mort). Duras’s techniques have become commonplace in contemporary theater, with characters no longer being fictional and actors improvising live. This avant-garde approach appealed to the Lapointe.

Meta-theatrical procedures, nesting dolls, logical displacements, artistic languages … Lapointe will use all the systems he has cherished over the past 15 years. Echoing Duras’s vision of cinema, in which she rejected commercial approaches, still images from the film will be worked on, and performer Karl Lemieux will give a live performance using altered film. The means used on stage will suggest war machines.

A unique music director team

Music co-direction by Marie-Annick Béliveau, artistic director of Chants Libres since 2022, and cellist and Quatuor Bozzini co-director Isabelle Bozzini is a unique combination, and Rósa Lind is fully aware of her good fortune. To create the work’s sonic universe, she composed a score for three vocalists, string quartet, flute, clarinet, harp and mixed percussion. Elements of an electroacoustic soundtrack were also added. The ensemble of virtuoso soloists includes Yuki Isami (flute) Victor Albert (clarinet) Antoine Malette-Chénier (harp) and David Therrien Brongo (percussion).

Lind’s concept builds a sound universe within the narrative realm of Duras’s work. Music and sound seek to belong to that space of personal memories, love, loss and world history. According to the composer, the boundaries between different media of expression become blurred when one works as closely as one can to inspiration. Hiroshima mon amour is a call for people to reconcile. In the current context of war and peace, it is a cautionary story.