Outro Fim

Music exists in time and, consequently, is an art of memory. In this way, any musical piece proposes to the listener a system of relationships, a return of signs, an identification of elements. To forgo this play of and with memory would be a way of hindering the reconstructive task that constitutes musical perception and of creating obstacles to the possibility of a narrative – properly musical – that is intelligible. 

I write “proposes to the listener” to avoid the poetic fallacy that consists of considering that the system of internal relationships, as long as it exists in the score, as long as it can be found and analysed there, constitutes in itself the legitimisation of the work as an internal structure and a work of art. One can understand that composers try to defend their work as they can. However, I think, today, along with many others, that this is not so. The system of relationships that a work proposes can only function to the extent that it translates into a perception of them. In a listening experience, perception is a sensory perception; in an analysis, there is an effort of reason. Moreover, in a single listening, there isn’t much time for that. There is only the time that the piece lasts. 

In the current site-specific condition that characterises the production of new Portuguese operas and, undoubtedly, almost all in the Western world, this is even more evident. One must therefore take advantage of the circumstance and its unrepeatable character because there is no future. In the case of this opera, and according to my usual procedures in the last decade, it is through musical gestures that I try to build signs capable of existing both on the level of writing and on the level of perception. I define a musical gesture as an entity that always starts by being a specific musical object, that, regardless of being constituted by a note, a phrase, or a group of notes, each endowed with a specific profile (rhythmic, temporal, density, intensity, or movement), facilitates both perceptual identification and vast possibilities of transformation or development.

Since it is an opera, the music exists in function of the characters, exists with the characters, their journey in the dramatic action, and, in this particular case, with the stage spaces. It exists with what they say/sing, with what they do/perform, with their disorientation and what they show us of the various manifestations of “the anguish of man in time.”

In July 2008, halfway through composing the work, I wrote for Culturgest’s quarterly programme: “The first reading of the libretto Outro Fim by José Maria Vieira Mendes showed me above all three things: that the words had a plasticity very suitable for an opera, that the dramatic action unfolded with the rhythm of a play, and, finally, that the characters were rich, had depth and psychological complexity. What more can one ask of a libretto? Hovering over this text – and this opera – are family dramas, the life stories of those who, faced with an unexciting daily life, end up reaching tragedies. 

My compositional work follows my usual procedure, that is, it starts with the text, the interpretation of situations, and the consideration of their potential. The musical materials created in this way are subjected to transformations and derivations of themselves, according to the unfolding of the action and the contingency of the creative act. The division of the stage into three simultaneously visible places of action, one of them being a café, motivated the choice of divisions between the main location of the musicians in the pit and small instrumental groups on stage at certain moments.”

There is no reason to change anything in this text, but I might perhaps add some details. In the course of my work on the opera, a kind of self-creation occurred in which the gestures themselves evolved between identity, repetition – fundamental in the libretto itself – and difference, appearances of some of their remnants modified to varying degrees according to the dramatic narrative. The café musics are perhaps plausible as such at the beginning of each of these scenes, but, according to my understanding of the text and what I think musical theatre is and its permanent movement between a reality and an interior of the characters, they end up giving way to a total implausibility with the diverse unfolding of the scenes. The musics move from the café to the places of thought or feeling where the composer places them. Another example, perhaps the most legible, the mother’s music, with her delusions and premonitions, begins in a clear form, establishes itself as a pillar, and throughout the opera undergoes small but successive alterations of various kinds. Finally, it appears in the final scene, Verão/Epílogo, as a partial disfiguration and vague dissolution as the hypothesis of return becomes illuminated, and thus the hypothesis of illusion or literary pretense.

The Dutchman Louis Andriessen said in a 2005 interview: “I try to compose good pieces.” We might think this is the simple objective that all composers establish from the start.

Of course, each one composes with their convictions, their theoretical-aesthetic criteria, but also with their imagination and creative capacity. However, we sometimes have the temptation to compose manifesto-pieces, pieces that, perhaps more than aspiring to simply be good, try to contain in themselves that character or, at least, are accompanied by literature from the author emphasising such a pretension. This manifesto-character can reveal itself in more or less strident proclamations of adherence to an aesthetic; it can reveal itself in the author’s conviction that they will, with their piece, change the world or reach some metaphysical level, some absolute. I have fallen into that useless temptation a few times. 

A decade ago, about my first two operas, I presented arguments to defend my positions within the framework of post-serial hegemony and the postmodern discussion. Perhaps that was necessary then, but today those issues have lost a great part of their meaning (except, perhaps, for a few dozen French and their disciples). 

During the composition of this opera, which proceeded with enthusiasm, everything seemed evident to me, all the connections between the scenes, all the changes, radical or not, in musical atmosphere seemed, to my ears, endowed with a kind of necessity, a musical and dramatic logic such that I didn’t even notice them. It may be time to accept Andriessen’s artisanal position and understand the modesty of the reach to which a musical work can aspire, pace Schopenhauer (who, incidentally, lived in a world that is no longer, in any way, ours). In that sense, I hope to have composed a good piece – and, in my delirium, I believe I have – although, in truth, I don’t even know well what that is. Despite the numerous philosophical treatises on the beautiful, the sublime–aesthetics in short–what a work of art is remains in the realm of unfathomable mysteries with which we relate through indecisive approximations. These analytics, almost always focusing on the works and less on the making, do not sufficiently consider the artisanal impulse characteristic of human work. Therefore, but also because an opera is the result of the work of a group of artists, I say, paraphrasing the wonderful Morton Feldman:

“We work. Others call it art.”