Emmanuelle Haïm We meet the French conductor
Emmanuelle Haïm
‘Ithought the world was collapsing, that music was going to disappear,’ says Emmanuelle Haïm. She’s at home in Paris, the hub of her life as founder of the early music ensemble Le Concert d’astrée and as a conductor whose international career takes her to the Philharmonics of Berlin, Vienna and New York. And to Korea, where she should be conducting Haydn’s The Seasons instead of talking to me over Zoom. As the crisis hit in March 2020 and caused the tide of cancellations in her diary, she felt very down. ‘I felt the absence of music so strongly and it was hard to keep hoping. But now I am fighting and am more able to imagine that something will happen again.’
Haïm’s life in recent months has proved what’s possible even ‘entre les gouttes’ – ‘between the raindrops’ – of lockdowns and restrictions. Last October, she convened a residency at the opera house in Lille, Le Concert d’astrée’s second home, based on performances of a shortened version of André Campra’s opera Idoménée. Unlike the more familiar Italian versions of the story, including Mozart’s composed 70 years later, Campra’s opera ends as every French tragedy does: properly tragically.
‘Of course we kill Idamante. Because we are barbarians compared to the Italians,’ Haïm jokes. ‘They want the lieto fine, the happy ending, but we want it bloody.’
But putting on any operatic performance – even a reduced version with a socially distanced orchestra, choir and soloists – to a one third-sized audience in the theatre was a challenge. ‘We had the orchestra on stage and I had everyone behind me, with the singers performing at the front’, along with provisions for the ‘dangerous people’ of the winds with their pesky aerosol production. The overwhelming reaction from the audience proved it was worth the effort. As Haïm says, for all the desperation of the times, she feels more strongly than ever the necessity of the arts: ‘Yes, we
need food, yes, we need our homes and everything else to survive, but we need more: we need music, we need books, we need to meet other people. And especially as conductors, we absolutely have to be as strong as we can to fight for the existence of music. Not only for us – for everyone else.’
They were lucky in Lille, because their performances fell exactly in the weeks of relative freedom between the ‘raindrops’ of France’s lockdowns. But these performances prove a bigger point about Haïm’s work with Le Concert d’astrée.
She and her musicians have made their 20 years of working together not only a success story of international touring and garlanded recordings, from Handel to Monteverdi to Purcell, as well as the French Baroque traditions she has been steeped in ever since her work in the 1990s as a harpsichordist for William Christie’s ensemble Les Arts Florissants; she and Le Concert d’astrée have also made longterms relationships with the communities of Lille, using their repertoire as a catalyst for creative connection and social cohesion.
But working with music that’s three or four centuries old, a repertoire that’s foreign to non-specialist musicians, let alone the communities of today’s Lille, might seem like a difficult place to start. That’s not how Haïm sees it. ‘Our repertoire must not be considered elitist,’ she says. ‘It has to be alive and thought of not as a piece of museum art, looked at from far away and treated super respectfully; no, you have to try it, you have to embody it. For me, there is always a way to bring people in. I always try to choose music that talks to me. I have to imagine that, if it moves me, it does that to others as well.’
You can see the success of previous projects online, as choirs of schoolchildren and amateur singers make the music of the French Baroque their own. But ‘building bridges’, as Haïm puts it, is one thing before the pandemic, when Le Concert d’astrée’s musicians could take their work to prisons, maternity wards and schools in the economically deprived areas of the city where their work is embedded. In the era of social distancing, much of that work has had to be postponed or moved online. And yet she and her musicians have found a way to keep ‘embodying’ their repertoire, recording Baroque choruses part by part, for all the schools in the north of France to learn from and perform themselves.
The Lille projects show how Haïm’s advocacy for the repertoire she loves is the opposite of an ivory tower search for ideals of historical verisimilitude. Instead, as every performance or recording of hers proves, it’s the intensity of the musical and emotional embodiment that matters to her, whether she’s revealing the expressive directness of Campra’s sacred music or the ferocious drama of Handel’s cantatas.
That’s the same blazing inspiration that drives her work with modern instrument orchestras around the world. Given the myopic narrowness of so many orchestras’ repertoire when it comes to music composed pre-1750 – for whom playing Handel or Bach, let alone Rameau or Lully, is now virtually terra incognita – surely she’s in a position in which she’s teaching these players how the music goes, whether they’re the Berlin Philharmonic or the LA Phil? ‘There may be times when I introduce music to them, when I know it better than them: French Baroque music is not known by a lot of musicians; they don’t have the opportunity to play it. I’m asked mainly to do my repertoire with these orchestras, but I think you have to come to these great orchestras with humility. Because they know a lot of things better than me, too.’
She admits compromises working with modern instrument orchestras who have less experience in improvising the Baroque ornamentation that her players in Le Concert d’astrée have so thrillingly at their fingertips, and says that ‘it’s really difficult to play notes inégales’ – those swinging, unequal, infectious rhythms of 17th- and 18th-century music – ‘with a heavy [modern] bow; it’s like asking a dancer who’s used to working on pointes to dance in a completely different way.’ Yet she compares the orchestral cultures of Vienna or Berlin to the unique ensembles of earlier centuries. ‘We have descriptions of the orchestra in Mannheim, how their crescendos were like the wind; or at Versailles, they talked about a “forest of lutes”’ – all those necks of the lutes swaying to the movement of their players – ‘and we haven’t really a clue what all of this really sounded like. And today, each orchestra has its own personality, the unique way they communicate with each other.’
For Haïm, the continuum of music history isn’t an intellectual divertissement, but a visceral reality. ‘When you play
‘Our repertoire has to be alive, and not thought of as a piece of museum art’
the overture to Rameau’s Naïs, which is so powerful’ – it has an eruptive timpani explosion in the middle section – ‘there’s a link between the timpani player of the time, and the player today, whatever their experience, via the language of the composer.’ And she remembers a performance with the Berlin Philharmonic in music from another Rameau opera, Dardanus. ‘In the “Calme des sens”, when Dardanus falls asleep, the quality of their playing in the pianissimo echoes of the music, the way they were tasting it’ – one of Haïm’s multi-sensory descriptions – ‘was incredibly moving; they hadn’t played the piece for a very long time, but they were enjoying it so much.’
Haïm returns to another of her essential musical passions next year – all being well for Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas in Geneva in April. It’s the first time she will conduct a staged production of a piece she recorded in 2004 after just three performances. ‘We should have had some concerts in London, but I was too intimidated. I thought, non, they will just think, who is this French girl coming to do Dido?’ That was London’s loss, then as now. In Geneva, she’s working with the composer and viola da gamba player Atsushi Sakai, making interpolations in Purcell’s score, with sonic visions of dream and nightmare that will dissolve and reconfigure the music. She is ecstatic about Purcell: ‘I love him so deeply: such a genius, so young; his harmonies are so unbelievable, so unexpected.’
It’s that fierce passion for the music she loves the most that burns through Haïm’s performances, stripping the centuries away between Purcell, Campra or Monteverdi and our time to an invisible membrane: their world becomes ours in the epochdissolving power of her music-making.
And it’s that intensity and commitment that sustains her through the pandemic, as musical culture in France, and everywhere else, deals with what she says is the ‘tsunami of consequences we are going to have even more now. We have to go through it with energy and optimism, to drive us on to be able to do more.’
A DVD of Rameau’s Les Boréades, featuring Haïm conducting Le Concert d’astrée and Opéra de Dijon, is out in March on Warner