Concert

The Fall of Fukuyama

Video opera – World premiere – Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, conducted by Daniel Harding. World Premiere

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Cast

Camille de Toledo — Libretto, video

Laurent P. Berger — Lighting, stage design

Pierre Nouvel — Régie et installation vidéo

Pierre Dupouey — Artiste associé à la création vidéo

Joachim Olender — Artiste associé à la création vidéo

Kevin Greenlaw — Francis Fukuyama

Jennifer Larmore — La Pythie

Tom Randle — L'Etudiant de Hambourg, le Janitor

Isabelle Cals — L'Hôtesse de l'air

Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France

Daniel Harding — Music director

Ensemble Aedes

Mathieu Romano — Chorus director

Program notes

Grégoire Hetzel and Camille de Toledo's first opera: a world premiere on medici.tv. A dark work on the 9/11 events.

In several airports across the world, news of the attacks of September 11, 2001, is being hectically broadcast. Flights are cancelled. Air traffic is interrupted. The trapped travelers (the Chorus) must wait. Some panic, others pray, and others cry or call loved ones. Powerless, trembling, they watch the flood of images from New York arriving via American television channels. Among them, five travelers split off from the crowd. An old, deranged woman haunts the airport's law-free zones. She is the voice of the dead, the disappeared: the voice of this infant 21st century of fury and of faith, where the gods steal from her what she calls "her children": soldiers, combatants, mujahideen, victims, kamikazes… Alternating between English and Arabic, she hears the voices of the "birds" in New York who, this morning, try to escape from the World Trade Center towers. Meanwhile, at the Milan airport, an Italian janitor cleans and polishes the departure and arrival halls. Perched on his marble polishing machine, he threads his way between the travelers, watching "his" airport become covered in the waste of the attacks – for as the travelers hope for their flights to depart, they eat, drink, camp out… In another airport, in front of the "business lounge," journalists track down Professor Francis Fukuyama: they want to question him, capture his reactions, and hear him speak: Has History begun again? "Professor" Fukuyama, a counselor to George W. Bush and a key figure in the neoconservative revolution in America, is also trapped. He intends to return to Washington but cannot. Assisted and soothed by a melancholic stewardess, he remembers his past commitment, his repeated celebration of a liberal, Reaganian, hegemonic United States and wonders how he could have been so blind to the "long history of American shame." The stewardess tries to calm him and, like the other travelers, remembers the concerns of the day, with her son's telephone call: "Mom, turn on the television! Turn on the television!" The United States has been struck. Everything is at a standstill: time, reason, memory. In the end, will Fukuyama recognize his blindness? Will he respond to the journalists' questioning? In Berlin, at the Schönefeld airport, the faces of the hijacker pilots appear on the television screens. Sarhan, the son of an Egyptian father, raised in Germany, recognizes Jarrah and Mohamed Atta as his classmates from his years as a young university student in Hamburg. Sarhan evokes the difficulty of reconciling these images of excess with the faces of those he used to see at the al-Quds Mosque…

For more information on the production, please visit http://chutedefukuyama.com/

This opera will be broadcast on France Musique and webcast on Arte Live Web, citedelamusiquelive.tv and medici.tv.

Artwork: © Yann Legendre. Text: http://chutedefukuyama.com/

The Fall of Fukuyama, Video Opera by Grégoire Hetzel and Camille de Toledo
World Premiere, commissioned by Radio France.
A production of Radio France and Toledo Art Forms in co-production with INA and with the participation of the DICRéAM

Read the opera's libretto: part 1, part 2.

More info