It seems the poet is a narcissist (more mirrors) and self-absorbed if not self-obsessed. This is exactly what the film and the opera address.
Does one ever ask the Surrealists to explain? But it’s worth listening as Cocteau lays out his belief in immortality and asks, “ Qu’est-ce que c’est qu’un poète?” A celestial court of men in suits pass sentence-there is a higher order than Death.Ī video of Cocteau speaking to the year 2000 (you can find it online, Jean Cocteau s’adresse à l’an 2000) heralds our entrance, but no one pays much attention, just background noise, as is the shadow boxing-someone asks me what that is about. Death / The Princess at a great cost to herself (the death of Death) grants Orphée that, for a poet must be immortal or be nothing worth.
Netia Jones has taken a split-screen cinematic concept and run with it, her video designs, animation and back projections referencing old film stock, black and white and negative, relying on Lucien Clergue’s period photos of Cocteau’s 1960 Le Testament d’Orphée set, and clips from the original film.Ī poet moving between two worlds, looking back, searching for immortality. This love affair with France and particularly Cocteau (one I must confess to sharing) I sense strongly in this opera, the first one of his Cocteau trilogy, followed by La Belle et la Bête in 1994 and Les Enfants Terribles in 1996. In the programme notes (from his memoir Words Without Music), Philip Glass tells of being in France for the first time in 1954 aged 17, the excitement and the decadence of the Bal des Artistes. Tonight at ENO we have it translated into English by Netia Jones (also director, costume and video designer, making her ENO debut) and Emma Jenkins. In 1993, Philip Glass turned the film into a chamber opera, using the film’s entire script as his libretto. Mirrors, gateways to the underworld, mysterious perspectives and magical surrealism: in 1927 Cocteau (polymath or dilettante according to differing opinions) wrote a play Orphée, which evolved in 1950 into a contemporary film (directed by Jean-Pierre Melville).
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