Notes on the composition of Confession: (June 2011)

 

When I started to work on the first sketches of Confession, Jacque Trussel and his co-libretist Margaret Vignola already had a nearly complete draft of the libretto and an idea of the appropriate musical style to employ. This would include some elements from the original score of Suor Angelica, such as the introductory ‘bell’ theme, an intimacy in the way characters are depicted and a dramatic vocal style, so we might possibly hear Confession followed by Suor Angelica as one seamless whole.  This being stated, we also realized during our first common discussions that, stylistically speaking, the new opera could not simply be a parody of Puccini’s idiom and that it needed to have its own voice.

As a composer, this double and contradictory requirement meant that I had to keep Suor Angelica in mind constantly, in order to make sure that Confession would inform Suor Angelica as intended but that at the same time, I had to turn my back to Puccini’s music so I would not be tempted to imitate his sound.  Thus, as soon as I had decided what material I was going to use from Suor Angelica, I would not open the score again or play a recording of it unless I wanted to refresh my memory of it. I rather went to other scores from the opera and art song repertoire and studied them by looking for elements that would help me achieving my attempts. I progressively set up a palette of references that I could use to compose my own music.

 

I then tried to imagine a specific musical world that would represent and individualize each character, as well as illustrate the nature and the evolution of their relationships to each other.  Because it takes place seven years before Suor Angelica, the characters of Confession also could not be entirely related to the way they appear in Puccini’s opera.

As an example, the Princess in Confession is more a reflection of Strauss’ Klytemnestra in Elektra (particularly in regards of her relationship to her adoptive daughter, Sophie) than of her personality as it appears in Suor Angelica. While being in the prime of her bitterness and still having her full strengths to engage an argument with a 17 years old young lady, she has not quite achieved yet the dignified manners she employs in Suor Angelica and her monstrous detachment to the fate of her sister’s daughter.  As an illustration of her innocent and fresh nature, Sophie’s musical personality leans more toward the art song’s world. In fact, one of the motives that accompanies her in the last scene, as she tries to imagine the future of her child, is derived from a song by Robert Schumann’s in his Opus 36 Sonntags am Rhein, which also evokes the idea of passing time.

Making a more direct reference to Suor Angelica, I used as a starting point for Anna-Viola’s musical personality a very simple and fresh eighth-note motive in lydian mode that appears only once in Puccini’s opera, five measures after rehearsal number 47, exactly at the moment when Angelica is remembering the last time she saw her sister.

 

This patchy network of cross references between various inspirations is also reflected in the way I constructed Confession as a piece of music. At the time I started to compose its music, I only had experience with small scale forms and I was not sure how I could manage to sustain composing an hour of continuous music.  So I naturally took the libretto as my main guide in thinking the structure of the opera as a whole.

Being divided into 6 scenes, I decided to use it as a story frame within which each scene was composed and treated like an individual piece. But these individual pieces would be connected to each other throughout the opera by using musical devices such as motives, keys, harmony, etc.

Similarly, I divided each scenes into smaller sections according to what the libretto offered in terms of possibilities to subdivide, and then I composed the music through, section by section. So, one could also see each of these divisions as as many individual shorter pieces or areas of development. The Priest’s aria which then turns into a duet between him and Sophie in the 4th scene is a good example of a somewhat individualized section, with its own specific properties. Sophie’s prayer at the end of the opera, with its playing around a single half-step moving back and forth to the last climatic moment of the opera, could also be an example of this arborescent notion of development. 

 

The key structure of Confession is centered around the opposition between B minor and D-flat major, where B minor corresponds to the negative forces, the Princess in particular, who makes her first appearance in this key and then maintains it and even imposes it to Sophie throughout their argument in the fifth scene. D-flat represents the positive and appeasing forces. That is why Anna-Viola’s scene, the Love Duet, the beginning of Sophie’s confession and eventually the entire opera end in the same warm and velvety colour of D-flat. 

 

If I wanted to avoid Confession to sound as if it could have been written by Puccini, I still tried to link both operas through more structural elements.

For instance, the overall key structure of Suor Angelica is a perfect fourth motion, from F at the opening of the piece to C at the end.  Likewise, the overall key progression of Confession moves from F sharp to D-flat.

An other example would be this sort of false resolution occurring in the middle of the 4th scene at rehearsal number 75, just when Sophie is about to start her confession, announcing the mystical motive and atmosphere of the end of the opera. It is an echo of this curious false ending that Puccini made in Suor Angelica, when the chorus of sister sings ‘Lodiamo la Vergine Santa’.

 

Elements of symbolism have also been used throughout the score of Confession.

The words "God" or "Lord", which have 17 occurrences in the libretto of Confession, received a particular musical treatment: every times they are mentioned, a tritonic relationship appears in the music, either harmonically or melodically, with the exception when Sophie mentions it as an expression of her own faith (thus, even though Sophie mentions God at rehearsal number 14, this tritonic relationship is still present because she does not speak for herself but for the Priest). I used this device as a mean to underline the purity and innocence of Sophie’s faith announcing the miracle that will conclude Suor Angelica, The "mystical" motive at rehearsal number 75 in Confession (mentioned above), made of an oscillation between major and minor chords on a dominant pedal, appears three times in the score, in reference to the Trinity. Its second occurrence, happening when Sophie is asking the Virgin to help her, is placed at the golden section of the opera as a symbol of the presence of God at a point where the balance of her life is going to be re-established through her faith.

 

Because the librettists and I did not intend to simply create an opera based on Puccini’s masterpiece, but rather we wanted Confession to inform Suor Angelica, I would suggest that, ideally, one should erase Suor Angelica from their memory before hearing Confession and should then hear Suor Angelica again, as both pieces are in fact two episodes in the tragic life of the same heroine.