Ionesco’s First Opera: An Introduction

Ionesco's First Opera An Introduction Rosette Lamont Eugene lonesco's one act opera-his first libretto-tells with utter simplicity and directness the moving story of the Polish Catholic priest Father Kolbe who will be canonized by Pope John Paul II in Rome in October. The priest (b. 1894, Zdunska-Wola) volunteered to take the place of a fellow Auschwitz prisoner condemned with nine others to a slow, horrible death by thirst and starvation. This punishment was meted out to ten men to serve as an example for the rest of the inmates following an unsuccessful escape attempt by a member of the ten men's block. Father Kolbe took the place of a family man in the hope that the latter would survive and eventually join his wife and children. Most of the ten prisoners died in a matter of days, but a few, sustained by Father Kolbe's spiritual courage, lived on beyond any expected time limit. Finally, the camp commander sent in a guard to inject the stubborn survivors with an acid that would put an end to their flickering life. The year was 1941. The story of Father Kolbe's heroic sacrifice inspired Rolf Hochhuth to write The Deputy. But whereas Hochhuth's historical drama focuses on the Pope's failure to denounce Nazi mass murders, lonesco's libretto brings us into the nightmarish world of what the French call I'univers concentrationnaire . The tag "theatre of the absurd" has prevented most people from discover29 ing lonesco's profoundly philosophical and mystical side. He is the creator of the dramatic genre we prefer to call "metaphysical farce." For lonesco humanity is divided into two races of men: those who live for the moment, in a kind of eternal present, that is, men of action, politicians, or artists who consider themselves to be political, and those who are concerned with religion , metaphysics, and the problem of death. In Present Past Past Present he writes: "To live in action, in hope, divorced from contemplation is to be stupid and blind." lonesco is a religious man. Brought up in the Orthodox faith, he goes frequently to his neighborhood Catholic church. What matters to him is the spiritual life, not the denomination. There are even traces of Buddhism in his thinking as when he speaks of the Indian "atman," a universal "conscience beyond the conscious self." We are all, lonesco writes, "like Cinderella . We live in expectation of the world's transfiguration, we keep on awaiting a few hours of blissful celebration. In the meanwhile we wear tattered rags and dwell in the desolate hut of reality." In a recent letter (January 4, 1982) in which the dramatist wrote me about his play Victims of Duty , he makes the following declaration: "There are scenes that clearly show the desire of Man to reach God. What is entirely erroneous is to give psychoanalytic explanations of the play. The play is about the ascent and fall of Man, about Choubert's spiritual failure." Three summers ago, in the course of a "decade lonesco" (a ten day series of symposia on the dramatist's oeuvre) held at the Centre International of Cerisy-la-Salle, lonesco, who was present through a major part of the debates , intervened forcefully in a discussion of The Chairs. Some lecturers were wondering what the image of the Emperor meant. Could It suggest Napoleon ? A great leader? lonesco answered: "One musn't say that the Emperor seen by the Old Couple is any kind of temporal ruler. The Old Man and the Old Woman see a kind of light. This is the presence of the King of Kings." Although an author's declaration does not bind the critic to read the text the way he is told to do, it has become more and more evident to careful students of lonesco, particularly to those who peruse his numerous Journals (Notes and Counternotes, Fragments of a Journal, Present Past Past Present , Antidotes, A Man in Question) that the neo-surrealist enfant terrible has been all along a masked philosopher. lonesco's favorite readings are Plato, Plotinus and other Gnostic thinkers, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. His only...