Roger Waters: From Pink Floyd to Opera

[Botley]

Wednesday, September 28, 2005
PART ONE

JS: This is "Soundcheck" at 93.9 WNYC and online at wnyc.org. I'm John Schaefer. When Roger Waters wrote Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall, Wish You Were Here... some critics and fans called these and other Pink Floyd albums 'operatic.' But now, the former Pink Floyd lead singer, songwriter and bass player has made it official: he's written an opera. Ça Ira is a full-length work set in the early years of the French revolution and featuring characters from every level of 18th-century French society — from Caribbean slaves to King Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette — and while the opera hasn't been staged (at least, not yet), you can hear it on a new release that came out yesterday from Sony Records. It also features a DVD that chronicles the opera's 15-year-long genesis. Roger Waters, welcome to "Soundcheck."

RW: Thank you very much.

JS: Now — the DVD, in addition to describing the arc of a 15-year progession, also leads me to wonder: now that you've composed an opera, do you really like opera?

RW: Well, my relationship with opera is a very narrow one, in that there are a few operas that I adore and have studied quite closely — mainly Puccini and most particularly Tosca, which I think is an extraordinary, stunning piece of work, which I've been to many performances of and listened to many, many recordings of — through that one work, almost, I've found my way into the heart of the form. Of course, in the 19th century, it was the most popular form that there was. It was the rock and roll of its day.

JS: Right. It was arena rock!

RW: It was!

JS: (laughing)

RW: It was as close as they could come, you know, and they came pretty close — considering they had no amplification and they were... it's amazing stuff.

JS: So, do you consider that... in some sense, the increasingly larger and more dramatic music pieces that you wrote over the years with Pink Floyd might have been leading you in this direction almost inevitably?

RW: You know, it's possible that that is part of the puzzle. But also, as a young man, I always listened to quite a lot of choral music. I was a big fan of Berlioz and Fauré, so... you know, Berlioz's Te Deum, which he wrote for two thousand voices or something — here's another man who, if he had been born a couple of hundred years later, would have undoubtedly been in rock and roll, because he made such an enormous noise with those bands that he put together — and all those voices in big, echoey, ecclesiastical forums.

JS: Berlioz certainly lived the rock and roll lifestyle of his day, didn't he?

RW: He certainly did, yeah!

JS: Obviously, we can't play the DVD on the radio. So, maybe you can just tell us how you got into this particular project, because I think what some people will find interesting is that you're not setting your own words, here.

RW: No, certainly, the genesis had nothing to do with my words. The original piece was written by a French couple who I knew very well called Etienne and Nadine Roda-Gil. They came to me with this 50-page manuscript, beautifully illustrated by Nadine, who was the visual artist of the team, and written by Etienne. It's a sort of polemical and philosophical history of the French Revolution, seen very much from his perspective and point of view. I was very impressed with the original document, and they came over and showed it to me and asked if I'd be prepared to attempt to set it to music. You know, "...are you insane?" was my first response. But I thought, "why not?" So I got an engineer into the studio... this kid and I worked together for a few weeks and eventually, I'd got a two-and-a-half hours-long demo, which I'd made on an old Studer 24-track. That was the genesis of it. Then Nadine died, sadly, so we had a big gap of six years. Then I picked it up again and, with Etienne's help, started working on it. But the big change came after I'd done a deal with Sony to make a record, when they badgered me mercilessly to write an English version of it.

JS: Ah-ha!

RW: I resisted that temptation... not temptation, I resisted their exhortations for a long time. But I eventually caved — gave in — and out of the writing of the translation, the thing developed a whole new life because I realized that I was not quite satisfied. It didn't have a strong-enough narrative thread in it. So, I found myself starting to write little prologues and joining pieces and little bits of story. So... it's very much, now, a dramatic collaboration between Etienne and myself.

JS: Alright. Now, you mentioned the artwork, which was Nadine Roda-Gil's contribution to the project... if folks would like to see that, you can go to the "Soundcheck" page on our website at wnyc.org to see what Roger Waters is talking about. The story covers the last days, basically, of the French monarchy. And there's all kinds of stuff going on: the execution of the King and the Queen of course, the storming of the Bastille... it's a huge panorama. It's also set — in a circus. How was that decision made?

RW: I collaborated through many years of this with a friend of mine in England called Rick Wentworth who is an orchestrator and a composer. He teaches at the Royal Academy, and so on. When we'd kind of finished this thing and we were listening to the mixes, I got a call from him one day and he said, "I'm really confused, what's going on, how does this...?" So we got together, and I wrote a set of stage directions — which exist somewhere — for the whole piece, and Rick would then say "Oh! I see what's happening there." I realized I'd had this thing in my mind all the way along as to how this could be set if it ever became a production. It has non-singing parts in it for clowns, and so on. It would be very difficult, I think, to stage anything like this in a "realistic" fashion. So it needed to become, you know, about burlesque and about movement and things that are symbolic rather than realistic.

JS: Alright. Well, let's hear Bryn Terfel in "The Grievences of the People," just an excerpt from the full-length opera Ça Ira by my guest, Roger Waters.

[Continued below]

[Botley]

PART TWO

JS: Some music from the opera Ça Ira by Roger Waters. The former lead singer, songwriter, bass player of Pink Floyd has made an opera called Ça Ira. Do you consider Ça Ira a political work?

RW: Yeah, I think it's a very political work.

JS: A follow-up question, then, would be: how do you resolve the conflict — if at all — between making a work that has some political content, and makes a political statement, with the need for an opera to entertain its audience?

RW: I'm not sure that I attempted any kind of a balancing act, here. The image of either the "balançoir," which is, you know, the French word for "swing" — there are a lot of Nadine's drawings that are about swings, or around guillotines and things like that — or the notion of the high wire, you know... it didn't feel like that to me. It feels like... the need to entertain was not foremost in my thinking. I respond to the text and to my own feelings about what the text conveys. If the piece is about anything, it's about the potential that all human beings have to identify a choice between good and ill, between the light and the dark in all of us and, having identified that potential, whether we can find it within ourselves to make the right choices and whether, when we do make those right choices — this is always assuming, of course, that good and evil is real... that it's not a myth or a miasma — whether those individual choices that we make nudge the organization of humanity, globally, in a direction that creates more happiness for more people; i.e., whether we can respond to our natural potential to behave in a humane manner or not. That is the large question, that is... that was asked by the Revolution, that is embodied in the Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme and also, of course, in the Declaration of Independence, here.

JS: We're speaking with Roger Waters about his new opera, Ça Ira, which was released yesterday on Sony Classical with libretto by Etienne and Nadine Roda-Gil. The opera seems, Roger, to treat Marie Antoinette with some sympathy... a character that I wouldn't think, politically, you would be sympathetic with.

RW: Well, you know, a lot of the history about Marie Antoinette that's been handed down to us — most famously the... you know, "let them eat cake!" remarks — is apocryphal. In fact, she never said that. However I'm sure Marie Antoinette was a spoiled rich kid, I'm equally sure that at the end — stipped of the paraphernalia of power and comfort — she discovered some self-evident truths about relationships between parents and children, and husbands and wives, and so on, and so forth. That is what I, in the parts of the writing that I have been responsible for, have tried to focus on. So, for instance, in the beginning of the opera, I have this confrontation between her and the main tenor character who's going to become a revolutionary priest when he grows up. They're very much at odds. She's very flippant, and he's saying "prenez-garde! Over the wall, there... there's problems, you may get swallowed up in them," rather prophetically. At the end, they meet again on the night before she's executed. Where she sings this aria about... her only great regret is to be parted from her children in her final hours, which is actually true. If you read her last letters that she wrote to her sister-in-law on that last night, that's what she said.

JS: Alright. Well, let's hear... this is soprano Ying Huang from the stellar cast that has been assembled for the new recording by Roger Waters of the opera called Ça Ira/There Is Hope.

(short excerpt played)

JS: "Marie Antoinette/The Last Night On Earth," from the opera Ça Ira/There Is Hope... an opera in three acts by Roger Waters, released yesterday on Sony Classical. Roger Waters, my guest on "Soundcheck"... you mentioned it is a political work, but politics for you seems to be a very personal thing. Is it true your parents were Communists? I read that some place, I don't know if that's germane...

RW: Well, they both were at various... my father was only a Communist for the last couple of years of his life. He was a very devout Christian, you know, Church of England... and for those reasons he was a conscientious objector at the beginning of the Second World War. In the work that he did in London — he worked as an ambulance driver, and doing voluntary work in bomb sites, and things — he became politically aware. So, he joined the Communist party. It was at that point that he went back to the Conscription Board and said, "excuse me, but I've changed my mind." He then did his basic training and officer training, and went with the Royal Fusiliers to Italy, and was killed at Anzio a few months later. So, that's a kind of... a very heroic story, obviously. My mother's politics remained central to her life, and she'd been very left-wing all her life. She left the Communist Party — in 1955, over Hungary... or '56 — as ninety percent of the card-carrying members of the Communist Party did in England at that time, when they realized that the USSR was not this big, warm, cuddly, patriarchical thing that they had hoped it might be... that they thought it had a potential for.

JS: So, your own form of political stance in your works has seemed to take a more humanist approach. You know, the individual's rights versus the collective, which can sometimes be in a lot of your work a kind of cold, unfeeling, trampling piece of machinery.

RW: I think anybody who's read any history, or who cares about history at all, or who's interested in politics, or the way societies work, has to understand a number of fundamental things. One is that the law is the cornerstone for happiness where human beings live collectively. The first thing is... how can we frame laws that serve the people? That's the first fundamental thing, and then in order that the laws should serve the people in the way that they're intended to, we then find ourselves involved with the ideas that... if we organize ourselves in political ways, what is the point of doing that? Why? Is it because of the credence that they gave in the French Revolution — and you guys did in your Revolution here, and we to a lesser extent in England in the 17th century — that individual human beings should have rights... rights of property, rights to a certain standard of living, and so on, and so forth? Or, is it all... because that's one choice, and the other choice is that the government actually has a different agenda, which is about supporting one small section of the population. It's about power and it's about acquisition, and it's about... there is no humane or humanitarian desire behind the way that things are organized. You could point the finger at the current administration in the United States, and say...

JS: (laughing) Is that where you're going with this?

RW: It seems very likely that that pertains, at this point: that they might pay lip service to the idea of freedom and so on, and so forth, but actually there seems to be a different agenda that seems to be about... "let's try and accumulate all the wealth around us, and screw everybody else!"

JS: Well, self-preservation is a very important force in individuals and obviously it can be important for certain collectives as well. Roger Waters is my guest on "Soundcheck". Will fans of your solo records, and before those, the Pink Floyd albums, find anything familiar in the musical writing of this new opera?

RW: Oh, I think so, yeah. I think it's... both melodically and harmonically, and in terms of the dynamic structure of the piece, I think it's very obviously my work.

JS: The sound of children's choirs, which was important in The Wall, is all over... I mean, there's two or three children's choirs in Ça Ira.

RW: Yeah, there are. Well, in Etienne's original libretto, the Sans-culottes and the Enfants — you know, the peasants and the street people — were expressed as a children's chorus very often. That seemed absolutely natural to me, and I took it from him. Symbolically, it's very interesting, you know. The idea of... the child, before there's been a chance for him to be subverted by the state, is in his most revolutionary state.

JS: Well, there are numerous other examples that I heard in the opera that sort of struck me as coming clearly from the person who wrote Animals, or Dark Side, or The Wall. One is the "Liberty" scene in Act Three, where we actually hear the guillotine swinging down. Sound effects, in addition to the conventional orchestration, are running throughout this opera.

RW: They are. They're written into the score. That's something we can do now because, you know, we can store all that information on a hard drive and... you just give a keyboard to one of the guys in the percussion section, and a score, and it's all pre-set, ready to go. Well, I say this... we're actually doing a concert performance of the piece in Rome on November 17th, so we'll find out on November 17th whether it works or not! But I think it will.

JS: Alright. Well, let's hear this excerpt from Act Three of the opera Ça Ira.

[Concluded below]

[Botley]

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.