Zeffirelli, Tchi Tchi

Another text from Recrudescence.

Zeffirelli, Tchi Tchi 

It's an experiment anyone can conduct. You decide, at a certain moment, not to settle for the poor sound of Verdi on television and to remember that La Traviata is also being broadcast in stereo on the radio station France-Musique. You choose, by chance, the beginning of the second act, the only happy moments of Alfredo ("De' miei bollenti spiriti..."), and you get France-Musique to lend its efforts and its decibels to Channel 2. Very quickly, you let out a cry: the presence of the music is suddenly such, that you wonder how you managed, just twenty seconds ago, to be content with that emaciated sound. The music is everywhere, and also the small sound effects in the film: carriages, horses, and even a small pond where Stratas and Domingo play at "happiness" in the purest Hamiltonian tradition of Coca-Cola ads (of which you know the only aria: "It's the real thing…").

Very quickly too, you become aware that what had seemed so grand and so beautiful, the Zeffirelli décor with all its gold (first act), its ochres (second act) and its blues (third act), is actually quite small. Just like the small screen that is hosting all these colors. It's enough for the music to take on a little amplitude for the image of the filmed opera to be sent back to its fundamental modesty. The image is indeed there, functioning like a simulation screen or an aquarium where the fish curiously seem "in sync" with the music. It offers the music lover a spot, as good as any, to rest its gaze. A spot where muted bodies act as a slightly out of steps pantomime of the opera we are hearing. The old-style music lover who followed "from the score" can give way to the one who will follow the opera on a "monitoring screen." 

And what a surprise then to recognise the bodies of the people whose voices you are hearing. Thus, it's not enough that the singers are betrayed by the TV sound, nor that they be mercilessly dubbed when they sing, they also have to appear on the monitoring screen as simulacra of themselves. Could this "diminished" image of themselves constitute a "plus"? No doubt that for Zeffirelli the answer is yes. 

The filmed opera, as practiced by the author of the immortal Jesus of Nazareth, rests on an iron principle, as strong as it is implicit: nothing is more horrible than the spectacle of singers. Nothing is more tedious, long or awkward than these open mouths, these thoracic cages filling up with air, these eyes that roll back or flutter. Everything that will "naturalise" these excesses is therefore a "plus." The good plus, if you will, is less of a plus. Less stunning intensity in the singing, more ordinary finesse in the movements of the body (always Coca-Cola). When Violetta sings at the end of the first act the famous "Sempre libera...," you sense it's already too much and that the body of Teresa Stratas must roll around in the décor to illustrate the feelings that Stratas' voice continues to carry but in her off-screen voice (unless we should rather speak of "off the chain voice"). 

There is a temptation of the music video in this Traviata. A video where we'd see the singers acting badly, but "in person," in "natural" roles, while their "supernatural" voices would be content to accompany them from afar. You wonder what taboo prevents Zeffirelli from going further in this direction. Why does he settle for a few subjective shots, half-dreamed, where Alfredo's future as a married man is prefigured? Why is he so timid? 

Stanislavski was already complaining, in 1925, that most actors "while singing at a certain tempo and rhythm, walk according to different one, gesture according to a third, feel their emotions according to a fourth. How, with this disconnect, can one achieve the harmony without which there is no music and which, first of all, demands a certain order'?" Yet, when Sobel found the right distance to show how Stratas played and sang Lulu, he was simply doing his work. Television was doing its own work, which consists (at best) of showing what the work of others consists of*. But when Zeffirelli settles for constantly replacing the spectacle of (dubbed) singers by the "music video" acting of the same singers who have become (pinned) "actors", he merely proves that he respects neither the singing nor the actor. Nor cinema, which, it seems, ought to know two or three things about that impossibility.

* This point is open to discussion. Although a well-known lazybones, your author often deplores the disappearance of work in films or with others. But if it's possible to compare Zeffirelli's simulacrum to other ways of treating singing — slightly more realistic ways (Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Moses and Aaron or Anne-Marie Mieville's Mon cher sujet) — it's because it's still about physical work. In a world where mediation jobs ("services", "communication") are ever more numerous, it's perhaps inevitable that work not only loses some of its moral (and Christian) aura but also becomes completely abstract. Many things are now working on their own and for us: machines, robots, signs, images. 

First published in Libération on December 21st, 1988. Reprinted in Recrudescence, Aléas Editeur, 1991.