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Death as Apotheosis Bogotá
Planetario
04/17/2025 - & April 18*, 2025
Claude Vivier: Kopernikus : Rituel de la mort
Americas Society, Sebastián Zubieta (Conductor)
This year’s edition of Bogotá’s Music of the Americas festival is the twentieth and twenty‑first centuries and featured music by composers from the Americas, interpreted by Colombian and international artists. The thirty‑nine concerts this year were presented over the course of four days in venues all over this city of over eleven million inhabitants. The venue for Vivier’s opera Kopernikus was, appropriately, Bogotá’s Planetarium. Though it does not address the tribulations of Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473‑1543), it does concern time, space and the universe, which are germane to the theme of the opera: the human journey into disintegration.
This mystical opera was a sensation upon its 1980 premiere. The avant‑garde music of Vivier, a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928‑2007) is admirable, with its allusions to different world musical traditions. Influences from Balinese, Japanese, Thai, Egyptian, Iranian and Native American are evident in this fascinating score. French-Canadian composer Claude Vivier (1948‑1983) was an avid traveller who galavanted across the planet with wild abandon, packing a lot into his short life of thirty‑five years. Likewise, the languages in the libretto are a clin d’śil to his fascination with language.
Sprinklings of German embellish the French text, but more prevalent is Vivier’s langue inventée, a metaphor for his fascination with language and universality. In a non‑linear narrative, protagonist Agni, personified by a mezzo, is initiated towards the ultimate goal, Death. On her journey towards disintegration, she’s aided by various characters: Lewis Carroll (author of Alice in Wonderland); Mozart; the Queen of the Night; Wagner; Merlin (the wizard); Baryton Martin; Copernicus, and his mother. Towards the end of the work, a narrator circulates throughout the planetarium, reading from the works of Copernicus, Galileo, Aristotle and Averroes, all great thinkers who defied prevailing views.
What may not have aged well is the opera’s subject matter. The spirituality of our disintegration into nothingness may have sounded fascinatingly avant‑garde in 1980, but is rather tame forty‑five years later. When death by incineration is the daily fate of children in Gaza, the salon idealization of death is not only pretentious, but offensive.
Nonetheless, the group Americas Society, who have been touring the world with this unique work, are excellent interpreters. The vocal roles were ideally cast, most notably Agni, Baryton Martin and Merlin, the latter interpreted by a bass. Unfortunately, the names of the vocalists were not provided in the program, nor online.
As this is an allegorical work, it’s best sparsely treated. Mercifully, this was their choice: no sets, dancers or explicit videography were added. Death, according to Vivier, is a dream state best left abstract. The viewer can immerse themselves into the freeform narrative, imagining whatever they want. After all, imagination is more powerful than dancers or elaborate video imagery. Americas Society supported Kopernikus with their well‑chosen vocalists and instrumentalists. Those representing protagonist Agni and her companions on their journey toward death were particularly well cast.
One would imagine few in the overwhelmingly young audience would have been familiar with the work. Only one middle‑aged couple, seated behind me, left in the middle of the seventy minute opera with the exasperated exclamation “Suerte!” (good luck). The rest of the audience in the 375‑seat auditorium seemed intrigued by the unusual experience. An animated discussion with a young man following the performance showed an appreciation of something new and welcomingly unfamiliar. Kopernikus need not be taken literally; this was never its intention. If it stimulated a young person to think about life and death, somewhere, Vivier is smiling.
Ossama el Naggar
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