Shéhérazade, une fille de la ville

The Thousand and One Nights is an immense and infinitely rich corpus, which has resonated the artistic universe of multiple cultures for centuries. And yet, on closer inspection, it’s not just a story about men. Sinbad, of course, Ali Baba and other heroes and anti-heroes populate this epic. only in the imagination of Scheherazade, who must save her life every night by passionately story for the Sultan. Imagining to stay alive, in short. And the source of these tales is her capacity for self-renewal, with anguish but also a certain pleasure in bringing to give life to the wildest characters and situations. So when Lucie Larnicol thought of me to write a sort of fairy tale for youth choir and instrumental ensemble, the place of women in The Thousand and One Nights seemed an appropriate subject. With the support of Marc-Olivier Dupin, who promotes the creation and dissemination of operatic works written for young people, the project was launched, inspired by the words of Rania Meziani. The libretto places Qherazade, or the women she embodies, at the heart of the subject. Like series, the work comprises episodes, summaries of certain tales, adaptations… with a with a penchant for what I would describe as “profound lightness”. The youth choir, at once characters, coryphaeus and soloists, respond to and blend with the voices of the two singers and the narrator. They are at the center, like Scheherazade, in both the present and the past. I chose to write straightforward music, made up of easily memorized gimmicks, formulas in canon, echoes, spoken/rhythmic voices, breaths, stage actions; music that is simple yet seeks a certain delicacy; music that is sometimes as funny as it is dramatic, like the great adventure of Scheherazade, who could be a girl of today, a young girl from the countryside or isolated cities, infinitely modern and in search of freedom. in search of freedom.

Benoit Menut