Some works become mythical. Such is the case with Ravel's Bolero, Beethoven's 5th Symphony or Mozart's Requiem. Like the characters Hamlet, Cyrano or Figaro, these works have transcended their authors.
How is this possible?
Personally, I don't think Chopin had any idea of what he was hinting at in his 24 Preludes. Nor did Bach realize the universal scope his work would create, even more powerful and still infinite three centuries later.
In the theater, there's a difference between the character and the actor. In music, the contact between the work and the performer is direct. No intermediaries. A priori.
But what do we know about our characters? The ones we play every day, well into our role, which we come to believe in so fervently that we no longer question it. But it's only a role... Dramatic, worried, doubtful, dreamy, fuzzy or controlling.
But when this disgruntled character turns to the author, as if to let him know that this isn't the story he wants, then a funny comedy begins! Does God exist? That's the least essential question of our lives. In truth, wouldn't it be more right to question the existence of the questioner?
THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE
French celebrated actor Fabrice Lucchini once declared in an interview: "I'm paid to be absent!". That is how artists show the way as some spiritual guides do.
Don't you have to believe you're "someone" to question any supposed outside creator? On the contrary, accepting to be nothing, you accept to be everything.
So the question of whether God exists is absurd. But the one of asking whether I exist is far more pertinent. And it could then appear that, since God exists, there is nothing other than That. Nothing else...
Surprisingly, when Ravel composed his Bolero, he was inspired by the sounds of a factory, the one he regularly passed as a child in the vicinity of his family home. Like a Chaplin's Modern Time, he painted what he saw of the machines, of a world gone mechanical. And this becomes a scrupulously repetitive rhythm, "without form nor development", as he himself puts it. No music at all! Ninety-five years later, after the success of its premiere, the work remains the most widely performed in the world.
So what happened?
The artist is often criticized, somewhat caricaturally, for his pride. And yet, how much do we need to be absent precisely to let the work really take hold?
And how much do we need to absent ourselves from our illusory persona to make room for the "creator" within us?
Let's be clear: to be absent is not to hide. It's not about avoiding or fleeing. It doesn't mean making ourselves small or trying to make ourselves invisible behind something other than oneself.
To be absent is to put down everything that is useless, false, noisy. Heavy. The past, the future. The fear of dying. Even, paradoxically, of disappearing. So, the moment we are ready to embrace our own disappearance comes the most powerful of all presences.
Eventually it's playing a character, knowing that he's just a character, however great or mediocre he may be.
Some romantics, like Chopin, may have flirted with death in a painful way, to find that space where the character is abandoned in favor of the greater Self. But in the end, all life is made up of borders between the visible and the invisible, between life and death, between what is me and what is the Other, between being and not being... For it's only at the border that I'm allowed to experiment with one or the other.
15 MINUTES OF FAME *
At a time when being in the spotlight through every possible media seems to be the very condition of existence, true radiance has never been so sought-after. Not from photographic flashes, spotlights or smartphones, but from the crackling at the bottom in a fireplace. Invisible, necessary. I think of certain shamans, certain wisemen inhabited by this immutable peace, who don't smile easily. Suddenly, a burst of laughter brings out from the outside what has never ceased to be inside. But in front of the crowd, no artificial smile, no mimicry learned by so many of us that consists of that rictus forcing the image of a personal pseudo-success. Nothing of the sort! Because you don't have to believe it. Laughter is a state of the heart. Not the presence of added light, but the absence of anything that might obscure the original light.
So when a work of art like this springs from the depths of the stars, it reminds us that there is no boundary between creator and creature. And so, the Hymn to Joy, whose melody so many young people know without knowing its author, continues to hum, just as human beings continue to believe themselves to be John, Jackson or Ashley, when in fact they are Life in action...
Suddenly, an echo comes to me, that of the only play I was lucky enough to act in as a little girl, directed by the famous Belgian stage director Armand Delcampe and the no less famous playwrighter Luigi Pirandello: Six Personnages en quête d'auteur (Six Characters in Search of an Author).
And if you didn't have to search for it anymore... What's yours like as an author?
In this time of winter stripping, of nature's introspection, I wish you a boundless inspiration. And all the crackling of your inner fire!
Musically yours,
Hélène Tysman
* Expression coined by the American artist Andy Warhol.