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Botley · #3 04-25-2006, 02:00 PM

PART THREE

JS: My guest is Roger Waters on "Soundcheck." The opera in three acts, Ça Ira/There Is Hope, features a stellar cast: Bryn Terfel, we've mentioned; Ying Huang, we've heard her; the tenor, Paul Groves; Ismael Lo is in the cast, the West African singer... so, clearly, not just Classical singers involved here.

RW: No. That piece ["To the Windward Isles"] is something I wrote based on a figure I did on a LinnDrum, very early on, and my idea always was...

JS: The LinnDrum being an early electronic drum machine...

RW: ...drum kit, yeah. It's a sequencer, basically, a very simple sequencer, but it only has percussive noises in it. There's a musical figure in this thing that I always imagined as... you know that great noise that street bands in South Africa make, where they have a couple of old battered brass instruments and some drums and things. There's a musical figure in the piece which is, you know, [Roger sings a syncopated rhythm ostinato] "ba-bap, ba-bap, ba-bap, ba-bap bah-bah!" I very much imagined it as brass, and so I worked like that, and I couldn't quite work out how to do the lyric. I found myself singing this quasi-kind-of-African stuff that came out of me naturally. Then I managed to start fitting some lyrics in, but I desperately wanted to have that kind of Senagalese, West African — or African, at least — phrasing. I knew Ismael because I wrote some lyrics, once, for a record of his ["Without Blame (La femme sans haine)," a duet with Marianne Faithfull from Lo's 1996 album Jammu Africa -Botley], and I'd always adored his voice. So we called him up and said, "hey, you want to come and sing on this opera?" and that was that.

JS: Well, the performances in Rome, in the middle of November... those are semi-staged? Is that how...?

RW: Yeah. Well, it's a concert performance. So we have a big orchestra, and a big choir, and the big children's choir, and eight soloists, and I'm putting together projections. We're going to put up a big screen behind the orchestra, so that we can illustrate the thing to some extent, give people fairer... more of a chance to follow what the story is. Those projections will include Nadine's drawings, obviously — the libretto — probably some contemporary paintings, and also... I'm working very closely with Sony here in New York now, and we're going to set up photographic sessions and make photographs that are pretending to be photographs of a production, which is kind of a slightly strange idea. But I think it will make the whole experience much easier to understand for people who come to the performance in Rome.

JS: Roger Waters, my guest... Ça Ira/There Is Hope — it was originally in French, you translated the whole opera into English except for the last two words, "ça ira," which means, literally, what?

RW: Well, "ça ira" literally is the future tense of "ça va." As we know, in French: "Comment ça va?" "Ça va... it's going, it's okay." So literally, it means "it will be okay." Now, when I've subtitled the thing, you know, "there is hope", it's because "it will be okay" doesn't... maybe it will be, maybe it won't be. My view is that there is hope. I always like to look on the positive side — of the potential for the human spirit to rise above commerce and to embrace the collective, in a way that is more humane — in a world that is constructed around the free market, simply.

JS: Well, I think that's a good place to leave it. We've been speaking with Roger Waters and hearing a little bit of his opera in three acts called Ça Ira/There Is Hope, released yesterday on Sony Classical. There will be a semi-staged performance... two of them in Rome, in mid-November. It'd be great to see it on the full operatic stage here in New York some time. Roger, until that time, thank you for joining us and congratulations.

RW: Thank you very much.