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  • Anybody’s Opera: An Introduction to Michel Leiris
  • Douglas Messerli

Author Michel Leiris (1901–1990) was a central figure in French culture for much of his life. Early on, he became interested in poetry and jazz, and through his introduction to numerous writers and artists—Max Jacob, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Desnos, Georges Bataille, and Leiris’s so-called mentor, André Masson, among them—he became involved in the Surrealist movement, writing for its magazines and publishing several Surrealist-based works, including the novel Aurora (1927–28). In 1929 Leiris had a falling out with Surrealist leader André Breton and contributed to several anti-Surrealist publications before penning numerous essays on art and creating ethnographical and sociological works, including the seminal study L’Afrique fantôme (1934), a work that argued, along with Claude Lévi-Strauss, for a subjectivist perspective for anthropological studies. Leiris later became known for his insightful autobiographical works, such as L’âge d’homme (Manhood, 1939).

One of Leiris’s major works is Operratiques, a quirky collection of short pieces he penned on his secret love, opera, beginning in 1959—a work that remained unpublished during his lifetime.1 As he declared in his outline to this small but densely written work, he perceived his “impertinent” and even “naive” collection of fragments on opera as an attempt to bring his views of the genre to the reader as neither a musician nor a man of the theater, but “as a writer who deals” openly with “aesthetic issues,” combining the concept of “opera” with the “erratic,” as in something deviating from the conventional or customary course, a kind of wandering through his beloved subject.2 Leiris suggests his approach to the subject quite coherently in his short comparison of “Nietzsche and Wagner,” wherein he describes Nietzsche as an “aphorist” and therefore a more modern thinker, as opposed to the “grandiose, fluid lyricism” and effacement of structure found in Wagner.3 Leiris himself is a kind of aphorist in these opera reflections, which consist of a combination of precise ideas, categorizations, observations, and what he has described elsewhere as brisées—metaphorically speaking, “broken branches,” the remnants or perhaps buds of new thought—as opposed to essays or structured critical commentary. [End Page 122]

There is a strong implication, helped by Leiris’ own demurral and the very brevity of the pieces, that the Operratiques might have been penned by anyone, at least by any intelligent operagoer. In truth, of course, Leiris’s comments are extremely well informed. Yet the unpretentious tone of his works suggests more a popular guide of literary and historically linked ideas about opera than to the erudite commentaries of opera critics and musicologists. While grounding his aphoristic commentaries in philosophical-based perceptions, Leiris nonetheless makes it all seem easy, encouraging any intelligent operagoers to feel that they might gather their own comments about the subject. That seems important, somehow, within the context of today’s cinema and Internet broadcasts from the Met and the Royal Opera House and the rise of unconventional and innovative new sites of opera production outside the proscenium theater. Had Leiris lived to partake of these new operagoing opportunities, I am certain he would have embraced the transformative changes they represent.

Douglas Messerli
Green Integer

Notes

1. Michel Leiris, Operratiques, ed. Jean Jamin (Paris: P.O.L., 1992); Operratics, trans. Guy Bennett (Copenhagen and Los Angeles: Green Integer Press, 2001).

2. “Outrecuidance—ou naïveté—qu’il y a pour un simple amateur (ni musicien ni homme de théâtre) d’émettre des vues sur l’opéra; cas particulier, toutefois, de cet amateur, qui est un écrivain et se pose donc des problèmes esthétiques que de telles réflexions. . . . (‘operratique’ = opéra + erratique),” “Titres,” in Operratiques, 11.

3. “Ce qui, chez Nietzsche, paraît être aux antipodes de Wagner, c’est son mode d’expression aphoristique. . . . Ce rejet du discours fait de Nietzsche un ‘moderne’, alors que Wagner—grand lyrique fluvial—ne peut être situé ailleurs que dans le romantisme.” “Nietzsche et Wagner,” Operratiques, 55. Emphasis is Leiris’s. [End Page 123]

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