Conductor Alain Trudel, left, director Dominic Champagne and composer Julien Bilodeau get up against the wall at Place des Arts on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 after the first rehearsal of Another Brick in the Wall.
It was the spring of 2014 when Pierre Dufour, then general director of the Opéra de Montréal, and Michel Beaulac, the opera company’s artistic director, approached Quebec composer Julien Bilodeau with the idea of turning Pink Floyd’s classic album The Wall into an opera.
The company had a good contact, a person who was able to put them in touch with former Pink Floyd singer/bassist Roger Waters, who was the main songwriter and creative force behind The Wall. Waters responded by saying Bilodeau should come up with a sample of his proposed adaptation and they’d take it from there.
So Bilodeau went straight to work and composed an operatic adaptation of three songs from The Wall — Another Brick in the Wall (Part I), The Happiest Days of Our Lives and Another Brick in the Wall (Part II) — in one block. Then they met noted Montreal director Dominic Champagne, best known for his involvement in Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles show Love, and he joined the team as stage director.
Now came the tough part: they had to convince a fairly skeptical Waters that he should give them the rights to transform his most famous work into a full-scale opera.
The Montrealers suggested they meet in person to play him what Bilodeau had composed, and the rock star agreed in the fall of 2014 to see them at his opulent home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Bilodeau said they made the trip to New York with one thing in mind: “If it’s ‘no’ for him, then it’s ‘no’ for us. That was the spirit we had.
“So in December we went to New York to play music for him, and that was the moment. He was really touched and we felt that he was a wiser man — that he was detached from this anger (in The Wall). We felt that the (recent solo) tour he’d done with this project gave him the freedom to leave his baby. He had two things in mind that he was afraid of. The first was a pop arrangement of the album. The other one was, is the composer going in (an atonal) direction?”
What he liked about Bilodeau’s score was that it remained in some ways faithful to his songs but that it was very much an opera, not a symphonic rearrangement of a rock album.
Another Brick in the Wall: The Opera was played in rehearsal for the first time Tuesday, in the basement of Place des Arts, by the Orchestre Métropolitain with Alain Trudel conducting. The work will be performed March 11 through 26 at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier of Place des Arts. The production will feature a 72-piece orchestra, a 48-member choir and a number of soloists.
Trudel says Waters had been approached with other proposals to turn The Wall into an opera in the years since the album’s release in 1979, but was at last won over by Bilodeau’s work.
“Roger Waters said, ‘You get it,’ ” recalled Trudel. “In opera, it’s the story that’s the lead of everything. A good story doesn’t need any kind of artificial (frills); a good story doesn’t need Botox. Roger Waters is the librettist, (the author of) the lyrics, and of course the tunes, the melodies, are the melodies from The Wall. But we’re going from 80, 90 minutes of the album to 2 1/2 hours, and the story has to be told.
“He gave Julien all the liberty in the world. It’s a trust thing. He had to trust Julien because he’s giving away his baby to Julien. So Julien had the biggest pressure. The real pressure is taking the notes of Roger Waters, his words, and coming up with (Bilodeau’s) own take on it. It’s not a rock opera. It’s The Wall. It respects the core essence of what The Wall is, but it’s not with electric guitars or drums. Like Comfortably Numb has a classic guitar solo, but there’s no guitar solo here. So I think he came through with flying colours.”
The central metaphor of The Wall is, of course, the wall that the main character, the tormented rock star Pink, builds between himself and his audience. The idea was inspired by Waters’s troubled memories of a terrible Pink Floyd concert at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium in 1977 that included him spitting on a fan.
The image is particularly timely, says Champagne, who points out that the man just elected president of the United States has promised to build a massive wall between the U.S. and Mexico.
“We’re now living in a world where people are building walls everywhere,” said Champagne. “You go into (Maison) Radio-Canada and there’s a wall. There’s someone who says, ‘Who are you? Where are you going? Put your name here, give us your number, here’s your badge.’ You go see a concert at the Bell Centre, it’s the same thing. Everything has to be secure and safe and we put walls everywhere.
“The ultimate example of that is Trump. We didn’t invent it. In the climax of Pink’s paranoid delirium, Waters uses neo-Nazi choreography. But we don’t need Waters’s choreography in today’s world. The ordinary fascism is there, and it’s democratic. So we’re bringing out this work right when this is happening in the U.S. and we’re going to go say, ‘Tear down the wall … all in all, it’s just another brick in the wall.’
“It’s also the story of someone who tries to protect himself from the rest of the world by building a wall, and Pink comes to a realization in The Wall. He starts by complaining: ‘My dad is dead, my mother over-protected me, my wife left me.’ He complains and he becomes the fascist leader who killed his father. And finally he says: ‘Stop.’ Then he decides to tear down the wall and once again live in the world. That’s the fable.”
There are plans to bring the opera to other cities around the world, but no dates have been booked yet.
“So here we may well take this piece to opera houses across a country where someone has just been democratically elected to build walls between the U.S. and Mexico … and maybe the rest of the world. So I think this work is more pertinent than ever. Sometimes you have this kind of synchronicity. You can’t say The Wall is just something from the past, good for nostalgic Pink Floyd fans.”
AT A GLANCE
Another Brick in the Wall: The Opera will be performed March 11, 13, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24 and 26 at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier of Place des Arts. Tickets are available at operademontreal.com.
{ SOURCE: Brendan Kelly, Montreal Gazette | https://goo.gl/f39ZyP }
