set and film design

Transfigured Night
music by Schoenberg
based on a poem by Richard Dehmel
For Opera North tour; National Film Theatre; and the Lux Open, Royal College of Art
January 2003

description

As ‘Verklärte Nacht’ is often spoken about as the birth of modern music, so new forms of representation characterised the modernist art movement: exploding perspective and looking at detail and infinity simultaneously. Speaking about film in relation to his music, Schoenberg said, ‘I want the utmost unreality! The whole thing should have the effect not of a dream but of chords.’ I took this as a starting point: how the film elements could have a freedom from their meaning. The edits of the film seem to respond to the music at times, but they also resemble a percussive instrument or an element of counterpoint.

The dialogue between the couple is a miscommunication or a failed encounter. For Freud, conscious activity and the unconscious are totally dependant but mutually exclusive. Communication is always disrupted by this relationship. In the film the images of the forest are sometimes in synch or chasing each other, at other moments they seem to relate directly to each other but are filmed in different mediums and can therefore never meet. The characters in the narrative are trapped in a loop of activity; they cannot fully communicate or understand one another.

There are five elements in the poem which broadly correspond to five sections in the music, three are descriptive (the first, third and fifth) for which I have taken the device of a circle, partly a moon or a microscope, or window… For longer descriptions, where the cello and the violin in turn denote the two characters, I use a spilt screen to illustrate the tension between them. The film starts as a succession of stills, building up to a film gradually, as each element is introduced; the forest, the abstract or universal world, the real world, and the actors or characters in the narrative.

poem by Richard Dehmel

Two People are walking through bare, cold grove;
the moon accompanies them, they gaze at it.
The moon courses above the high oaks;
not a cloud obscures the light of heaven,
into which the black treetops reach.
A woman’s voice speaks:
I am carrying a child, and not of yours;
I walk in sin beside you.
I have deeply transgressed against myself.
I no longer believed in happiness
and yet had a great yearning
for purposeful life, for the happiness
and responsibility of motherhood; so I dared
and, shuddering, let my body
be embraced by a strange man,
and from it have become pregnant.
Now life has taken its revenge,
now that I have met you.
She walks with awkward step.
She looks up: the moon accompanies them.
Her dark glance is inundated with light.
A man’s voice speaks:
Let the child you have conceived
be no burden on your soul.
O see, how brightly the universe gleams!
There is a radiance on everything;
you drift with me on a cold sea,
but a special warmth flickers
from you to me, from me to you.
This will transfigure the other’s child;
you will bear it for me, from me;
you have brought radiance on me,
you have made me a child myself.
He clasps her round her strong hips.
Their breath mingles in the breeze.
Two people walk through the high, clear night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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