El Cimarrón

Hans Werner Henze (1926–2012) — Music Theater

New Production Of The Festival D’aix-en-provence

With The Support Of Karolina Blaberg Stiftung, Ammodo Art, Jean-françois Dubos, Cercle Incises, Fonds Axa Pour Le Progrès Humain

The maroon: a term which was originally used to describe domestic animals that had returned to the wild after escaping, and which later came to designate runaway slaves who took refuge in inaccessible places. In 1968 in Cuba, Hans Werner Henze happened upon the rare and vivid testimony of a former cimarrón, by then a centenarian, who had subsequently become a participant in the war of independence and then the revolution. Working in collaboration with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Henze turned that testimony into a veritable musical phenomenon: an experimental recital of unparalleled dramatic intensity, poetic suggestiveness, vocal rigor, and instrumental inventiveness, which awakens in the very soul of the spectators a day-to-day existence of violence and suffering followed by an uncertain escape into a forest teeming with fantastical beings, and finally the intuition of a liberating revolutionary brotherhood, like the sudden appearance of the sky. Relying on a very physical stage direction, Elayce Ismail gives this moving story its universal mythical value and brings out its exceptional cathartic potential.