Proust's Court of Love
In voluntary exile for the last decade of his life, immersed in a tangled knot of neuroses, eccentricities, anxieties, and doubts, Marcel Proust recaptured his experiences and immortalized the loves of his real and fictional lives in his sweeping novel À la recherche du temps perdu, a breathtaking voyage through the unconscious.
ERC’s theatrical concert features a script that draws upon Proust’s novel, his letters, and the reminiscences of his faithful housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, the only person who witnessed the creation of his masterpiece. Focusing on the perpetual conflict between love and jealousy, the script dramatizes these emotions in tandem with a selection of musical works that emulate the modernity of Proust’s superbly calibrated language. The author’s stream-of-consciousness technique and his detailed depiction of the fluctuations of human behavior will be mirrored in music of comparable complexity, richness of texture, and sensorial beauty.
Proust’s Court of Love was part of our 2010-2011 Season.
2010-2011 Season
Love Looks Not With the Eyes, But With the Mind
Madness, obsession, betrayal; tenderness, jealousy, violence; the most sublime happiness and the deepest despair. Love is the greatest canvas on which the drama of human life unfolds, the lever of human joys and sorrows. Whether it storms the heart or arrives by stealth to colonize our souls, love is at once creator and destroyer, trickster and magician.
ERC explores this most powerful of all emotions in a series of three concerts reflecting the myriad facets of love, its torments and bliss, and its power to bewitch gods and mortals.