Erwartung 's sole protagonist is a woman who, in terror in the darkness of the night, waits in vain and desperately searches at the edge of a forest for her beloved, only to eventually find him dead. From the man's anguished search springs a delirious and fragmented monologue without interruption, revealing a succession of opposing emotions - hatred, lust, jealousy, forgiveness - and of memories, omens, hallucinations and manifestations of dismay until the dramatic climax reached with the gruesome discovery of the lifeless man. The Freudian-derived psychoanalytic dimension emerges prominently in this "stream of consciousness," in this "snapshot of life" that is projected over the course of half an hour, from image to image, and whose convulsive drama the music masterfully takes on.

I loveopera. It is a unique art that has the power to transform space and time and puts us in touch with our innermost part, our innermost and secret emotions.

Berlioz, Poulenc and Schoenberg composed three short works, three condensations of humanity. When I first heard them one after the other, I was in a state of shock, hallucination. I was voiceless.

Cléopâtre the lady of Monte Carlo and the woman of Erwartung are three tragic heroines; they are on the precipice, teetering, before the abyss.

But they are very different from each other.

I imagine them as the three ages of women, maturity, old age and youth, lived in three different eras and three different territories.

La mort de Cléopâtre recounts the last minutes of a queen's life. A woman who had been able to resist the invader by using her beauty, making love a weapon. Now, for the first time, a man has gone numb; her charm is gone, she is defeated and dies.

In the passage to death he will have to confront his past actions. For his meditation Berlioz has created poignant, intense and profound music that breaks completely with the splendor of the first half of the cantata.

I want to enact the moment of this transformation. The moment when the woman who embodies power, after offering herself one last time to her people, enters the realm of shadows. Alone, with the memory of her dead ancestors, the tragedy penetrates to the heart and we suffer with her; the queen in that moment is nothing but a woman before death.

La dame de Monte Carlo was composed from Poulenc from a song written from Cocteau for cabaret. She is a woman whom life has not spared. She enjoyed much, before being abandoned, betrayed by her lovers and fortune. Now withered, she has found refuge in the thrill of the game.

Tonight she has hit bottom, lost everything. She wanders wandering and desperate in the night of Montecarle or Monte Carlo.

I chose to show this woman as if she were an issue of a musical magazine. The lady of the past, balanced between the orchestra and the audience, becomes a tightrope walker. She sings, talks to the denizens of the night, street sweepers, tramps, a couple in love. Delirious, she is fed up with herself. The Mediterranean Sea is very close: there she can finally find her longed-for rest.

With Erwartung, Schoenberg propels music into modernity. It is a'opera that ushers in the music of the 20th century. Based on the delirious libretto of a young medical student, Marie Pappenheim, it is a true theatrical monologue.

A young woman waits in the woods at night.

Everything is familiar but for that very reason appears threatening. What was once reassuring now suddenly frightens her. The woman speaks to the moon, the cricket, and the man she will find dead. The forest seems like that of a terrifying children's tale where the unconscious of dreams and nightmares intertwine with reality, warping the perception of things until to making them monstrous.

Schoenberg tried to recount in thirty minutes the few seconds after a traumatizing event. Many people recount that after experiencing an accident they saw their lives flow before their eyes. As if that instant had the power to stretch until to they could encompass a whole life.

This is the starting point of the performance of Erwartung. There has been an accident, a woman wanders in the woods, when the music begins everything has already happened.

Like in a Lynch or Cronenberg film, there is the carcass of the car still smoking, but she does not see it. She is busy elsewhere, in her head, in her heart, to chasing away what happened.

Is he already rewriting history? Is he trying to forget what just happened?

An argument between two lovers at the wheel, an involuntary gesture too abruptly and the car goes off the road? Or was there a premeditated intent to kill the lover who betrayed her?

We will not give answers to these questions. The important thing is the emotion conveyed from this young woman in crisis, grappling with the unbearable, which she tries to manage as best she can. She is on the brink of madness and death, hanging over the abyss.

With Laurent P. Berger we chose to highlight the scenic arch of the New Theater. It becomes the threshold of Cléopâtre's tomb, and the tomb itself is flattened, resembling a bas-relief torn from a temple wall.

It becomes a screen, an abstract backdrop, against which Poulenc's lady in her tightrope act is silhouetted.

It is the window through which viewers see the forest and can spy on Erwartung's woman.

Luisa Spinatelli conceived the costumes of the various eras in an attempt to place these women in a contemporary vision.

The union of the three musical pieces is beautiful and courageous. I would like to thank the Spoleto Festival and in particular Giorgio Ferrara, for the trust they have placed in me by asking me to stage this intense and subtle passage through the history of 19th and early 20th century music.

Frédéric Fisbach