Sans tambour

Und meine Seele spannte Weit ihre Flügel aus, Flog durch die stillen Lande, Als flöge sie nach Haus.

My soul spread its wings wide, flew through the silent moors as if flying home.

from Mondnacht (Moonlight Night),

verses by Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff

from Liederkreis op. 39

by Robert Shumann

It sounds like a mere technical detail but it is not: the collection of Lieder op. 39 by German composer Robert Schumann (1810-1856) is called "Kreis" and not "Zyklus" by its author himself. In Italian there is only the word "ciclo," but in German there is a subtle difference between the two words. Musicologist Walter Wiora explains it this way: a "Zyklus" of songs is made from many parts that, in chronological order, tell a story, outlining a before or after, following a thread that is understandable and shared with the listener. In a "Kreis," on the other hand, the boundaries are more blurred: there is no before and there is no after, there are many moods, many visual and poetic fragments that all together form an inner world. If a Zyklus accompanies the listener by the hand, a Kreis invites him to to get lost and to seek- si from only his own way.

And seeking their own way in a world reduced to rubble is precisely what the actors, singers and musicians on stage in French director Samuel Achache's Sans tambour do. Achache's work from time revolves around the mechanisms that link music and theater, singing and acting. With his company La Sourde, he founded an orchestra that brings together musicians from a wide range of experiences: early music, jazz and improvisation. "And it's not about building a specialized orchestra," the director explains, "but an orchestra whose specialty is the people who make it up." The question that Achache's shows, from Le Crocodile trompeur/Didon et Énée to this Sans tambour seem to ask is "How to watch music? How to listen to theater?"

When we enter the theater we see a house. A man at the top to a ladder has just finished building it: he is setting the last stone. to a certain point everything collapses: only one master wall remains standing, the one on which the ladder rests. The man is up there watching his world fall apart.

In many languages the word "home" and the word "homeland," "place of birth" coincide. The rubble of a home is the fragments of the life and history of the people who lived there. The images we see today of the bombings in Ukraine are as old as history: people who, before fleeing and finding their way in the world, linger to picking up the last fragments of their past history. The search for a lost home, a distant homeland, a shattered identity is one of the themes, quintessentially German Romantic, that underlie von Eichendorff's lyrics set to music from Schumann.

There is also a piano in the rubble of the house, but it is destroyed, no longer playing. The man who saw his world crumble needs help to pick up the fragments of his story, to return to playing and singing his "Kreis" of songs. Through Schumann's Lieder here is opera a reconstruction: there is an awareness in all the performers on stage that they will never be able to rebuild the house as it was before but they can stitch the memory together, with love and deep pity and with the idea that after destruction there is never an end but always a transformation. The choice to talk about reconstruction starting from Schumann's Lieder is a poetic and effective choice also for an underlying reason, I would say also social. The Lied accompanied by the piano, besides being the romantic music par excellence, is also the music of domestic intimacy, of the hearth. In every home where there was a piano one could sing. And when the piano is gone, as in this case, the music can still be evoked with what is there.

Sans tambour is above all the reconstruction of a mental space, of a space of memory through music and acting, and Schumann's Lieder, in their poetic fragmentariness of "Kreis," more than a thread from follow offer, both to the performers on stage and to the audience in the auditorium, a spiritual matter with which to begin a patient opera of transformation of what was and what can never be again.

Daniel Cassandro