Théorie des Larmes, Brice Pauset

About the Event

"Théorie des Larmes", by Brice Pauset, is a contemporary creation whose force backs away neither from reason nor emotion, transcendent in the heart‐rending incarnation of humanity as performed by Salome Kammer.

Louise de Bellayre‐du‐Tronchet, who took the name of Louise du Néant, had all the hallmarks of a medieval saint: ecstasies, dialogues with God, ascetic excesses, desire for mortification and prostration. She was born in the 17th century, an era of regulated expression and collective faith, and the mysticism of which she appears to be a resurgence, had lost all credibility in a century of classical reason; the ecstasies of the body came to be no longer associated with extraordinary faith but rather with pathology and disease: she was interned in 1677 in the nether regions of the General Hospital of Salpêtriere, along with the insane and vagrants. Some fifty of her letters survive, in which she describes her ambition for union with God.

It is this anachronistic figure and her letters, which question the relationship between the body and the spiritual as well as with society, that Brice Pauset has chosen to set to music in Théorie des Larmes. This concert piece – drawn from his monologue Exercices du Silence, given in January 2011 at the Staatsoper in Berlin — reveals “the price to pay for an ideal” through an impeccable architecture and prodigiously efficient and intense music, mixed with reminiscences of the Stabat Mater.