Da Camera takes on ‘A Proust Sonata’
A madeleine and a cup of tea—Marcel Proust’s epic seven-volume “In Search of Lost Time” begins simply enough. But madeleines aside, if you’ve heard anything about Proust, it’s that his work is hardly easy. Relentless and demanding, he’s brought many courageous readers to their knees. And so it is rather remarkable that Da Camera of Houston will capture Proust on stage in the space of a few hours.
A world premiere, Da Camera’s “A Proust Sonata” will unfold in seven musical tableaux on Friday at the Cullen Theater. It’s a cast of two characters and a handful of musicians with an abstract, relatively bare set of hanging images that shift, sometimes into film, from scene to scene. The Narrator (Henry Stram) and Céleste (Nancy Hume) will perform excerpts from “In Search of Lost Time” and Céleste Albaret’s memoir “Monsieur Proust,” an account of the many years Albaret spent as Proust’s maid. Musicians will perform pieces ranging from Faure and Debussy to the lesserknown Leon Delafosse and Reynaldo Hahn.
For all its fearsome reputation, “In Search of Lost Time” tells a fairly straightforward story of an aspiring artist coming of age: A boy who wishes desperately to become a writer finally becomes a writer. Along the way, he falls in love, he has his heart broken, he learns about sexuality (his own and others’), and he discovers that his idols are merely humans, flawed and prone to failure just like him.
But beneath this surface, everything does get terrifyingly complex if you let it, mostly because it exposes us to a kind of time we’re just not used to. Paragraphs and even single sentences march on for pages without reprieve. The plot itself, based largely in memory, unfolds slowly and, in recalling past moments over and over again, seems in many ways not to move at all.
To succeed with Proust, you have to pick an angle to focus on, and Da Camera artistic director Sarah Rothenberg, conceiver and director of this project, has chosen the Proustian experience.
“I really stayed away from plot,” Rothenberg said. “It’s the way he articulates our experience; it doesn’t matter what our outer lives are. We all have the inner experiences that Proust describes.”
As a way to capture the breadth of Proust without asking years from an audience, Rothenberg has tied several art forms together to create a total kind of exposure. Music, image, theater and text weave together the big themes Proust is known for: love and loss, death and desire.
“Is it theater, is it music, is it a concert? It’s not specifically any one of these,” Rothenberg said. “We really tried to create an equal balance between all of the elements so that it becomes another kind of chamber music.”
The Parisian salon, an intimate gathering of artists and patrons that saw its heyday in the 19th century, acts as the foundation for the project. For Proust, the salon was integral, both in his seven-volume work and in his life. It’s where he met Hahn, a composer who became one of his greatest loves.
Tenor Nicholas Phan, who will sing a number of songs by Hahn as well as Delafosse, has yet to soldier through all of Proust’s seven volumes but said the salon scenes in the first volume have fascinated him.
“The salon was the cultural lifeblood,” Phan said. “People have sort of lost their focus on it. But people are hungry for experiencing music in very different ways… there might be a resurgence.”
Proust is difficult to condense, but he’s also challenging to make accessible or even interesting to an audience now. Along with noting the exciting potential of a salon today, Phan emphasized how fresh this performance will come across given the way Rothenberg has constructed it.
“I think of this gigantic piece of literature that has loomed over intellectual minds ever since,” Phan said. “What’s going to be amazing about it is that it’s going to feel so current and so real.”
Rothenberg’s seven tableaux are organized in sonata form, a classical three-part structure that ends with a return of all the themes. The madeleine and the cup of tea that famously set off the first volume will close “A Proust Sonata” instead, playing up the circularity of the seven volumes.
“It’s shocking when you eventually get to the last page,” Rothenberg said. “It’s not something with an end.”
This is not a cruel, never-ending trick that Proust plays on those who do summit “In Search of Lost Time.” It’s more of a slip in time dimensions, a revolution of the everyday existence. Don’t take my word for it, though — you’ll have to experience it yourself.