Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné

How many Alagnas does it take to make the Victor Hugo-inspired opera Le dernier jour d'un condamné? Three: Roberto to sing it (and he does so brilliantly), David to compose the deadly earnest music and Frédérico to create the scribbly illustrations in the confusing DG package. All three take credit for the libretto. - David Patrick Stearns at gramophone.co.uk "Revenge belongs to the individual, punishment belongs to God. Society is in between. To chastise is above it, to avenge below it. Nothing so great or so small suits it." (Preface to Dernier Jour d'un Condamné, 1832) In this preface, Victor Hugo's strongest argument in favour of the abolition of the death penalty is the definition of the role of a societal conscience midway between the Human and the Divine. Roberto, David and Frédérico Alagna are artists of their own time, touched by the current distresses and moved by doubt for the modernity of the example. Hugo's theme is still current. Death dealt to one human being by another makes the skin crawl, no matter the name of the condemned or the crime he or she has committed. But the Alagna's version adds to that: no matter their sex, no matter their race. Next to the condemned man, there is the condemned woman -- man and woman, different times but equal in their suffering. Their songs intertwine, are superimposed over each other, then harmonise and unite at the moment that life ends. The score respectfully maintains the clarity and tempo of Hugo's prose but David Alagna, child of the opera, could not let himself be trapped in a merely declamatory genre. Although the characters are imprisoned, the voices and styles are free and, in order to serve them with respect to a certain lyrical tradition, David managed to compose an introspective music at once tonal and new, to represent the torment of the condemned by a harmonically impressive work sometimes tending toward dissonance. His portrayal of interior drama is meticulous, methodical, as though to prepare us for the violence of the final destruction, for the moment of the execution, when time ceases to exist and chaos takes its seat before the condemned man's cries for mercy, the prayer of prayers smothered by a trance the colour of the Sicilian tarantella. The tonal structure collapses as a festive tribal music builds. The orchestra goes percussive and encapsulates us in the rhythms of primitive ritual. Then David Alagna composes the aborted return to Harmony to better resonate the echo of the horrified exhalations of those trapped in the silence of death. The three brothers fire up full-voiced in order to take us, almost unnoticed, to the prisons of the most "civilised" nations where we murder, even today, women, and more often than not, women whose first fault is their colour. What an inspired idea to impart the role of the Condemned woman to the marvellous Indra Thomas! Fight for the abolishment of the death penalty, struggle against discrimination, against sufferings, both of women and of men, since after all, "the one is the other". How can we not think of Elisabeth and Robert Badinter? Would the brothers let me write that their Dernier Jour d'un Condamné is an homage to their commitment? - Pierre-Henri Loÿs, in booklet in container.