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When the flame dies

Recent studies in opera (Abbate, 2003; Grover-Friedlander, 2005) stress the story of Orpheus as the ‘founding myth’ of opera, since traces of the legend are present, implicitly and explicitly, in numerous works over the genre’s 400-year history. Further, these studies stress the myth’s link to the centrality of the singing voice in opera, since the relationship between the persuasive power of music and the Other is ‘immanent’ in the voice, thereby imparting an expressive power unique to the medium. Film too has often sought to appropriate the expressive energies of opera. A striking example is Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1950). My project proceeded from the premise that this film’s success in appropriating the Orphic myth into a cultural form that reaches far wider than opera created the opportunity for a creative and critical exchange between Cocteau’s film and a new opera, with the aim of ‘reclaiming the Orphic myth for opera’ (comment by Michal Grover-Friedlander, October 2012).

When the Flame Dies sought to achieve this by translating a number of filmic methods to operatic form, including: (1) applying the filmic concept of the crossfade to musical sequences by creating long transitions between live singing and electronic sequences, so that a filmic device is appropriated to serve Abbate’s operatic concept of a ‘transfiguring moment’; (2) inscribing some of Cocteau’s personal filmic methods, such as the use of visual reflections and afterimages, in compositional techniques and electronic treatments; (3) creating a musical metaphor for the ‘porous’ world of Cocteau’s film through the use of processes of delay (sonic, harmonic) in the live electronic treatments of singing voices and ensemble. The project sought thereby to figure Cocteau’s filmic language as music, and to translate current film and music theory on the power of the operatic voice into the practice of contemporary opera.