BUILDING THE WALL
Tonight marks the world premiere of Another Brick in the Wall, an opera based on the legendary Pink Floyd album The Wall. Meet the creative team that turned the iconic progressive rock album into a fullfledged work presented by the Opéra de Montréal.
There are many ways to build The Wall. The cover design for the 1979 Pink Floyd album was a minimalistic black-and-white impression of brickwork. (The album was conceived by an existentially distraught Roger Waters after he spat at a fan during a show in Montreal in 1977.) The 1982 movie by Alan Parker went instead for visual overload, its live action alternating with Gerald Scarfe’s savagely surreal animation to depict war, neofascism on the march, rock-star excess and schoolchildren processed into sausage meat.
Waters is on record as saying he found the film’s approach to be too “unremitting in its onslaught on the senses,” but that hasn’t stopped him from aiming for an ever more stunning spectacle in his stage version, with its apocalyptic fireworks, swooping bombers, towering puppets and, of course, the wall itself being implacably erected brick by brick throughout the performance.
With such iconic visuals in the memory bank, how much is Opéra de Montréal drawing on them for Another Brick in the Wall: The Opera? The answer is: not so much.
“Roger Waters is doing very well with his own performances of The Wall,” understates the project’s initiator, Pierre Dufour (who quit his position as director of Opéra de Montréal largely to concentrate on the project full time). “We tried to stay far away from that. The idea is to bring The Wall into an operatic dimension. So yes, we have sets, we have cartoons, video, sound effects, all that. But the focus has to be on the words, on the singing, on the characters.”
Director Dominic Champagne agrees. “I certainly didn’t want to do a live version of the movie, or to do a symphonic version of a rock show. We had to find our own way to do it. So when we started with an evocation of that spitting incident, I suddenly saw, ‘OK, this is not the movie, this is not the album. This is our way to look through the keyhole.’ ”
Set designer Stéphane Roy describes some of the specific visuals: “We begin with the audience seeing the spitting incident from the point of view of backstage. Then the rock star is on a trolley in a white clinic — it’s something like the esthetic of the last scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He’s burned out, on drugs to calm him down.”
At which point the character, who starts out as a version of Waters himself, evolves into protagonist Pink and begins to hallucinate incidents from his past, some of which are projected onto two white walls moving in on him.
“There are doctors around him,” Roy continues. “He looks at a nurse who’s becoming a groupie as the drugs kick in. … She’s getting sexier and sexier, then: Whoops — my god! — it’s his mother!”
Roy is careful not to give too much away beyond this, but he does promise that “there is a wall, but it won’t be Roger Waters’s vision of the wall.” He also hints that “it’s all the walls we’re talking about today: the Berlin Wall, the Mexican wall and so on. We’re punching very hard on that reality — the world getting walls, walls and more walls than ever.”
For his part, composer Julien Bilodeau has worked on putting a respectful distance between Waters’s original conception and his own compositions.
“I had 18 pages of text for an opera,” he says. “That’s very little. And always the same guy, Pink, who is singing. I first had to find a way to expand the text without adding to it, then to make a distribution of the lyrics to different characters.
“Pink is still around 75 per cent of the singing. The rest is the Mother, the Wife, the Father and so on. And then there’s the choir, where I can repeat the text and transpose some of Pink’s words. For instance, the scene where the father dies, you have all these widows coming towards the bodies of their husbands, and you have a female choir singing Goodbye Blue Sky. I was told that the choir have a lot more work than they usually have. They are thrilled with that.”
SOME BRICKS IN THE WALL
Pink
“If you wanna find out what’s behind these cold eyes / You’re just gonna have to claw your way through this disguise”
The largely autobiographical foundation of The Wall, Pink is also partly based on Syd Barrett, the legendary founding member of Pink Floyd who succumbed to reclusiveness and possible mental illness. Pink, who is played by baritone Étienne Dupuis, suffers a breakdown and is haunted by memories of his father’s death during the war, his mother’s overprotectiveness, the brutality of his school days and a doomed marriage. He also falls prey to fantasies of fascistic omnipotence.
Champagne describes Pink as a tragic hero. “Nowadays, heroes are not like Hercules,” he says. “They’re rock stars, like Bowie, and like Roger Waters.”
The Mother
“Mama’s gonna make all of your nightmares come true / Mama’s gonna put all of her fears into you”
The album of The Wall introduces Pink’s mother with a tender, seemingly loving lullabystyle song. But the lyrics soon reveal that there’s something toxic running through the maternal affection.
“The Mother is about protection,” says Bilodeau. “There’s something mean about her, but it’s not really her fault. She’s also a widow, so she’s dealing with a tragedy, and the way she’s dealing with it is imposing too much protection over her child.”
In the opera, she is portrayed by France Bellemare. “We needed a woman who comes across as strong,” says Bilodeau, “with a voice that’s not too high — somewhere in the middle-high range which can suggest the Mother’s power.”
The Father
“Daddy’s flown across the ocean / Leaving just a memory”
Waters’s father, Eric, was killed in the Battle of Anzio during the Second World War while Waters was a baby. His remains were never found. This painful absence comes to flesh-andblood life in the opera with the character of the Father, a symbol of Pink’s feelings of abandonment and desolation.
He’s played by Jean-Michel Richer, a tenor who, according to Bilodeau, is able to convey the Father’s fragility.
“The true story,” Bilodeau explains, “is that Roger Waters’s father was against the war for a few months, and even campaigned against it. But at some point he realized ... there was a real danger. So he decided to enlist, did six weeks training, went to Italy, and three weeks later he was killed.”
In 2014, in a small village south of Rome, 70 years to the day after Eric was killed, Waters unveiled a memorial to the father he never knew.
Vera Lynn
“Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn?”
Waters asks that question in the song named after the lady herself. Perhaps not so much in Montreal, but in the Britain of Waters’s birth, Vera Lynn is a still-living legend. (She celebrates her 100th birthday March 20.) Dubbed “the Forces’ sweetheart,” she became the mellifluous voice of the Second World War with the unbearably poignant song We’ll Meet Again, as well as The White Cliffs of Dover. She makes a brief appearance in the opera, courtesy of mezzosoprano Stéphanie Pothier.
“It’s a great moment, but I don’t want to spoil it,” says Bilodeau. Will Pothier get to sing a variation on Dame Vera’s greatest hit?
“We’ll see,” Bilodeau says with a mischievous smile.
The Teacher
“When we grew up and went to school / There were certain teachers who would / Hurt the children in any way they could”
Perhaps the most emblematic figure in The Wall is the Teacher, thanks largely to the chart-topping hit that enjoined him to leave those kids alone. In the film version, he’s memorably animated by cartoonist Gerald Scarfe; in the stage show, he’s an equally grotesque and terrifying puppet. In the opera, he’s played by Dominic Lorange, who in the rehearsal snippet offered to the media last week certainly conveyed the character’s vile sadism as he descended, cane swishing, on a young, heartbreakingly vulnerable Pink played by Émile Burbidge Izquierdo.
Lorange is a tenor, which might seem surprising for such an all-powerful authority figure until we remember Waters’s lyric that the Teacher is in turn terrorized by a “fat and psychopathic” wife who regularly thrashes him within an inch of his life.