After a long time trying to find “his” librettist, Briton George Benjamin (b. 1960) eventually met a chosen partner in fellow playwright Martin Crimp (b. 1956). Together they have written four lyrical works: Into the Little Hill (2006), Written on Skin (2012), Lessons in Love and Violence (2018) and the newly premiered Picture a Day Like This (2021-2022). at the Aix-en-Provence Festival.

This seven-scene opera, widely acclaimed by critics, is once again a sophisticated yet affordable masterpiece. Martin Crimp’s text practices the art of radiant banality, with very simple, sometimes trivial situations and words. They had also shocked the composer at the beginning of their collaboration, who did not see how to put “driver”, “limousine”, “refrigerator” to music…

The stories that Crimp offers Benjamin often have the allure of a familiar tale: Picture a Day Like This, which narrates the initiatory journey of a woman whose child has died, brings to light distant echoes of The Magic Flute ( 1791), Mozart, Erwartung (1909), Schoenberg, or Love and the Life of a Woman (1840), the lieder cycle by Robert Schumann, on poems by Chamisso (where a child is born and a spouse dies).

Opera tradition

And Crimp is not unaware of the commonplaces (in the noble sense of the term) of the operatic tradition: scene of love, scene of hell or fury (the Artisan dependent on drugs), scene of fairyland (the last) , and even a character of a composer, as in Richard Strauss – in this case a vain star composer, flanked by an assistant in her pay.

For his part, George Benjamin wrote a score of a very beautiful harmonic and orchestral richness. Its unfathomable complexity – which can be observed on re-listening or by immersing oneself in the score – never obliterates its immediately perceptible beauty. Moreover, it respects the intelligibility of classical prosody.

Without winks or quotes, Picture a Day Like This also evokes certain past works: how not to think of the heartbreaking duet of the Child and the Princess in L’Enfant et les Sortilèges (1925), by Maurice Ravel, on a libretto by Colette, during the last scene, miraculously beautiful in sound (and visual, with unreal projections), which mixes the ethereal chant of Zabelle and the desperate song of the Woman?

To this competition of successes are added a fair staging – except that it abuses the “trick” consisting in mixing the props with the extras – and a young cast perfectly prepared. With, first of all, the French mezzo Marianne Crebassa, whose close-ups from the camera of François Roussillon accentuate the resemblance of the face to that of Chiara Mastroianni.

Her vocal colors – sonorous and dense lows and highs, or subtly lightened – and the suppressed pain she expresses make her unforgettable in this custom-written role.