MEDIATHEK

La Passion de Simone [The Passion of Simone] is about a woman’s attempt to find an example in the life French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943) through her own life. She will try to retell it through her singing, and relive it in her flesh, in the likeness of the Evangelista in Bach’s Passions –the formal model of the piece, that allows each and everyone to experience this identification.

Simone Weil has indeed, thanks to her wide erudition, drawn her inspiration from all Western and Eastern spiritual traditions, and truly committed herself to an ideal of sanctity, by putting ascetically her principles into practice, from the experience of working in a factory to the Spanish Civil War, until her untimely death, following the fast she observed out of solidarity for the starving people of Occupied France.

This matchless work, which finds a universal scope through an individual’s destiny, was born from the collaboration between committed French-Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf and Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. The staging of the premiere, in Vienna in 2006, was by Peter Sellars, who contributed very much to the writing process: the work therefore bears the mark of his twofold social and spiritual interests, perfectly brought to life by Saariaho’s mysterious music.

In its very form and conception, La Passion de Simone calls for a theatrical work, or in other words a spatial and dramaturgical approach to the music, in the tradition of oratorio: therefore not a theatre of costumes and scenery flats, but a theatre of the mind, (driven by dramaturgy, music and bodies), a theatre of contemplation, which could in contemporary language be called a theatre of remembrance.