Três mulheres com máscara de ferro

A short note regarding the score Três mulheres com máscara de ferro, by Eurico Carrapatoso, a static drama in one act, based on the homonymous and unpublished text by Agustina Bessa-Luís.

I’ve always liked challenges. But this one, posed by João Lourenço and Vera San Payo de Lemos, was one of the biggest I’ve accepted: writing an opera based on a text that was not initially conceived for that purpose. All the music was certainly conditioned by that sweet original sin, a risk I could and, above all, wanted to take.

Our first meeting was in November 2013. On that occasion, I became acquainted with the unpublished text by Agustina Bessa-Luís, Três mulheres com máscara de ferro. There it was, that little play, with an “autumnal tone, of sorrowful ends of day.” It wasn’t a libretto. I kept mulling over the idea, like one chews over a troublesome tooth.
In March 2014, after four months of silence following the first meeting, I received the phone call from João Lourenço: “It’s going ahead. You can proceed!” I wasn’t expecting the news. I had that expression on my face that men often have at the barber’s: an oblique look, with the extreme melancholy of someone chasing after shorn hair, against a background sound of icy scissors’ snips (not only the effective ones that cut, but also those with which the barber, scissors raised, tries out his stereophonic moves).

Yes: there rose before me, in a dramatic orography similar to that of Curral das Freiras, a sheer mountain, a dead end to overcome. I went to the bottom drawers of my being to fetch the climbing gear. And off I went, scaling a static drama in one act, lasting an hour, in the summer time. A static drama whose plot, according to Fernando Pessoa’s definition cited by Isabel Pires de Lima in her analysis of Agustina’s play, “does not constitute action – that is, where the figures not only do not act, because they neither move nor dialogue about moving, but they don’t even have senses capable of producing an action; where there is no conflict nor perfect plot” (…) where “there can be revelation of souls without action [revelation of souls through exchanged words (“sung,” in accordance with my element)], and there can be creation of situations of inertia, moments of the soul without windows or doors to reality.” (…)

In other words: climbing wasn’t all that summer had in store for me. It was, above all and ultimately, spelunking. Ah, yes! not forgetting the rappel necessary to close the work, with the return of Ema, Fanny, and Sibila to the petrified condition of the Three Graces.

The score also ended up with three distinct sections:

1. Instrumental Prelude, in which the Three Graces, emerging from the lethargy of their mythological condition, gain the breath of life. Three ostinati planes: 1st plane, in the piano, relating to Fanny (alpha and omega, beginning and end, angel and demon, like a Byzantine icon raised in a pantocrator position); 2nd plane, in the strings, relating to Ema (here, deep and uterine pedals in the cello; there, harmonics in the violin tasting of a wind of unbearable lightness); 3rd plane, in the clarinet, relating to Sibila (telluric/Douro valley song of a divinatory bird, with some Gregorian traces which, in the ensemble of the three planes, might evoke liturgical rituals of a post-nuclear time).
2. Vocal Section: the static drama proper, in which Sibila, Fanny, and Ema, three canonical figures of Agustinian fiction, are summoned to reveal “what is the principal thing.” This section is itself divided into two large segments: in the first, they gradually remove their masks and reveal their worldview. The music is, literally, in the third person, rolling freely on the rails of half a dozen recurring motifs, some quite kinetic, such as, for example, the acidulated warbling of the clarinet, always sibylline, which erupts right at the beginning of this part. In the second segment, the three women reveal – or not – what the principal thing is. The music, here, is in the first person. All the oil of contradictions, complexes, inner conflicts, ambiguities, perversions, dissatisfactions, fetishisms, repressions, longings, illusions, disappointments, remorse, drives comes to the surface. The music, now, is an oil painting of dark pastels (spelunking, there it is), illuminated by a handful of solar decompressions, certainly, but essentially a lunar music, as if veiled by a dark shroud.
3. Instrumental Epilogue, accompanying the return of the three women to their initial condition, recovering the musical substance of the prelude, the final phase of the rappel, giving the work some Fabergé-like contour, an oblong cycle that completes itself.