PREY Claude (1925-1998)

Claude Prey was born on 30 May 1925 in Fleury-sur-Andelle. He spent his childhood in Normandy where he studied the piano and the organ. He listened to Mozart, Gabriel Fauré and developed an interest in the music scores and opera librettos that belonged to his grandfather, the founder of a municipal wind band. At the age of 13 he wrote his first sketches, for an opera entitled La mort de Roland, to a libretto by his brother, but it was not until 1942, after the composition of an Offertoire for organ, that his desire to become a composer was truly expressed.

In 1945 he settled in Paris, studying literature at the Sorbonne, where he gained a degree in letters as well as a higher diploma in aesthetics. He presented a dissertation on ‘a signification of the evolution of music’, that contains the seeds of his commitment to the renewal of operatic form. Starting with his personal observation of the historic death of music as a separate and independent art, he wanted to branch into a theatre that would be at once event, play and catharsis. In parallel, in 1947, he entered the Paris Conservatory in the harmony class of Olivier Messiaen, and then in the composition class of Darius Milhaud (1949), two teacher-composers whose music he also appreciated. In addition, he frequented the Opéra Comique and the Palais Garnier and attended various performances: Milhaud’s Le pauvre Matelot, Debussy‘s Pelléas et Mélisande, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tiresias, Britten’s Peter Grimes.

From 1946 to 1952, Claude Prey wrote albums of songs to his own poems as well as poems by Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Henri Michaux. From  1953, after his studies at the Conservatory, he undertook several journeys. In Greece he became interested in Byzantine music, then collected Amerindian music in Brazil, Peru and Bolivia. In Canada he studied the last vestiges of French folklore. The New World for Claude Prey was that of oral traditions, folklore and tales, in which he immersed himself.

Back in France he entered the competition for the RTF Prize for francophone authors and composers, of which Henri Dutilleux then directed the ‘service of illustrations’. His piece Lettres perdues, written in Quebec and which contains pastiches of Milhaud, Hindemith and Schönberg, attracted the attention of the jury. He won the competition, and Philippe Soupault, a member of the jury, proposed to him shortly afterwards that he be the composer of his radiophonic opera libretto, Le cœur révélateur. In this work, the music creates the atmosphere of each moment in a drama that never settles down. The story is that of an assassin pursued by hallucinations, who thinks he hears the heartbeats of his victim and eventually gives himself away. The score, in serial style, presents itself as a symphony with an overture à la française, Rondo, Scherzo and Trio. One can detect in it a certain influence of Berg’s Wozzeck. Daniel Chabrun conducted the ORTF orchestra for its stage premiere in 1964 and subsequently conducted many first performances of Prey’s work. Le cœur révélateur received the Prix Italia in 1963. The composer was on the pathway to success. Other prizes were to follow, including the Prince Rainier of Monaco Prize and the prize of the Ville de Paris.

Le cœur révélateur is the only one of his operas for which Prey did not write the libretto.

A lover a words, a great connoisseur of Marcel Proust, he undertook research into the text, the word. His own texts are often sharp, caustic, corrosive, with uninhibited, acrid humour. He was an ironic observer of his own time, deriding it in librettos, the complex construction of which displays great subtlety, a multiplicity of levels of interpretation and a play of cultural references. He blends erudition and verbal inventiveness, puns and quotations in the manner of a Raymond Queneau, never telling a story without also revealing its mechanism. He invents new forms: anagrammatic and anaphonetic poems, an example of which can be found in La donna mobile (1964), an opera he wrote step by step, discussing and testing each page with the actors, gaining at the same time experience in the dynamics of groups.

Claude Prey imposes upon himself stylistic constraints, and the more arduous they are the more it is enriching. In L’escalier de Chambord (1981) the 12 letters of the title serve merely for narratives taken from literature and the thirteen phonemes are reserved for the dialogues. The composer thus manages to use words that are harmonised among themselves and realise as it were cinematographic dissolves. In O comme eau (1984) he uses a single vocable, imagining a submerged Venice in which the Venetians, having lost language, no longer have anything but the sound ‘o’ to express themselves. He takes the reduction of language as a symptom of psychological disaster, a symbol of mutilation, of deprivation of freedom. Theatre, with whatever is to hand, becomes therapy.

Claude Prey’s work lies in the lineage of Brecht’s experiments with theatre and with those of Moreno with psychodrama. His models are the Claudel-opera (Christophe Colomb), the Cocteau-opera (Oedipus Rex), as well as Brecht’s anti-opera (The Beggar’s Opera), drama that is realist and that sings. He wrote his librettos at the piano, playing tremolos in order to hear the different periods of the action. To write a dialogue he needed above all to hear its intonations, so much so that when the libretto was complete, the music was virtually composed. For Claude Prey, who believed that the difficulty composers had to write operas was to be explained by a lack of suitable librettos, theatre IS musical. He wrote texts in a French adapted for singing. Charmed by the number 12 and by total chromaticism, integrating serialism, he was nonetheless primarily concerned by melodic articulation and continuity, using pivot notes, tonality and modulations. His vocal or instrumental phrase followed quite simply the inflexions of the spoken intonation, language playing a predominant role, the same phrase having possible several meanings according to the notation of its intonation, its rhythm, its ambitus, even its tone-colour.

Prey’s theatre is one of a realism that is of variable ‘distanciation’. A polar opposite of the Wagnerian style of Bayreuth in which the illusion should be total, his own musical theatre makes the orchestra completely visible, often placing it on stage  on the same level as the actors. The preferred place for such a theatre is naturally to be found in the ‘cour d’honneur’ of the Palais des Papes and the Cloître des Célestins in Avignon, where it is quite impossible to construct an orchestra pit. In Les liaisons dangereuses (1973), an epistolary opera using selected texts of Choderlos de Laclos, the integration of the musicians in the spectacle is total. Five main characters are on stage and next to each of them is a musical instrument played by instrumentalist-actors, secondary characters in the action. Everything is inextricably bound together in this work: vocal music and instrumental music, music and text, illusion and reality.

The adaptation of classic novels forms a particular category in the operatic production of Claude Prey, who chose well-known works of French writers enabling him to be performed in France as in Japan and the USA (Le rouge et le noir, 1988, from Stendhal). The other main opera category concerns those with an original subject that develops an unusual situation. The themes are often committed, linked to current social or political issues, the composer paying particular attention to the intellectual currents of his day. He deals with pacifism in Jonas (1963), an opera sparked by the war in Algeria and that expresses the internal debate of an imprisoned conscientious objector; of feminism in Dona Mobile; of the stock market crash in Lunedi blu; in La noirceur du lait he calls the Rorschach test into question in a light-hearted manner. With On veut la lumière ? Allons-y !, an opera-parody (1968) that uses a series to unite highly disparate elements, he indulged in a veritable structuralist analysis of music from the time of the Dreyfus affair. This is truth-theatre, and includes a passage without any music, written from the trial records; the music is in the text, notated by the punctuation. All Prey’s works on an original subject follow exactly the same plan: a catastrophe at the beginning, the disappearance of something, the necessity of starting again from zero, then, element by element, the initial world is reconstructed in spite of this fundamental lack (and so the catastrophe might return). One may also note the recurrent presence of a priest and references to Petrarch. The composer also likes to play with interactions between past and present, where everything comes together and blends without resolving issues of continuity. For example, Le Phénix, written between 1951 and 1957, includes a scene that is a transposition of Molière’s play Les Femmes Savantes, reviving the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, tonality against serialism. What is more, Prey skilfully employs quotation, collage, pastiche, parody, stylistic exercises on the music of composers from the past, notably Gabriel Fauré.

A musician of the theatre, attentive to dramaturgy, involved in stage direction, concerned with words as much as with notes, Claude Prey died on 13 February 1998 in Paris, having devoted the whole of his life and his inspiration to opera by bringing to it a new breath of fresh air.