Intoxicated by words and music

Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal was a set text at university and appealingly so with its themes of drunkenness, intoxication, love, beauty, ennui and anguish. A decade or so later and the collection crossed my path again as I saw an amazing performance directed by Frédéric Dussenne at the Théâtre Marni in Brussels.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect as I entered the theatre for “Baudelaire: music and poetry”. As it turned out, I was treated to a spectacle that combined drama, theatre, dance and music. The words were almost entirely taken from the Fleurs du Mal collection (the one exception was a prose poem by Baudelaire that was set to music by Benoît Mernier) and either sung by the soprano Sophie Karthäuser or spoken by the actor Angelo Bison.

Bison’s delivery was particularly powerful. He turned what could have been a straight poetry recital into a truly theatrical performance. The stage had little on it: on the left was the pianist David Lively at his grand piano with the soprano in front of him, on the right the actor dressed in black with a single chair as a prop. When the poems spoke of beauty and love, Bison looked imploringly at the soprano, when the poems raised questions, he turned to the audience. At times he was calm, at others he stormed into the audience or off the stage in a fit of rage or anger or desperation. He was totally in command of the audience’s reactions, orchestrating whether we watched in silence, allowed ourselves a little chuckle when asked what we should get drunk on, or made our skins crawl as he spat out the words of Une charogne (carrion). I was captivated.

The rhythm and metre of the poetry were brilliantly accentuated by Bison and at times it was as if he was almost singing. It was a natural transition between his poems and those sung by Karthäuser such as Harmonie du soir (Evening’s harmony) or La mort des amants (The death of lovers), both set to music by Claude Debussy. As well as the piano, song and spoken word, dance was also woven into the performance with a male dancer representing for example ‘evening’ and ‘the devil’.

According to the director, Baudelaire was “a musician of spoken French”. Well, that certainly came across in last night’s performance. Wonderful stuff.