What a woman! The daughter of a composer and a novelist, Franz Liszt and Marie d'Agoult, her first husband an aristocratic and talented conductor, Hans Von Bülow, the mistress then the second wife of one of the greatest names in European music, Richard Wagner, Cosima, almost indestructible, lived to the age of 92. She spent the last 43 years of her life defending, protecting, mummifying perhaps, the work of Richard, so much older than her who was 24 when she fell in love with him. Christophe Fiat has been interested for several years in this figure of a woman with a remarkable destiny, he was fascinated by the resistance, the unshakable will of this woman who, in a man's world, succeeded in taking over, in 1883, the direction of the Bayreuth Festival, in imposing a strong artistic vision and experiencing a genuine cultural epic in the middle of a Europe turned upside down. Using anecdotes, moments from his heroine's private and public lives, Christophe Fiat has invented an astonishing fable. A fiction that draws its sources from the real, an tale that he wants to communicate outside any documentary theatre, by summoning several actresses and one actor. Together, they become at the same time the bearers of the words of Cosima, who is locked up in her active solitude, and narrators of a family history that has crossed Europe and the United States for a century and a half. Using rock music, "a musical art as important today as opera was in Cosima's time," the author-director has also invented an image-projection system that provides this theatre-performance the means to show at the same time the private aspects of a life and the story of a myth. JFP
Distribution
text and direction Christophe Fiat
scenography Christophe Fiat, Louise Armand, Pierre Yves Macé
music Pierre-Yves Macé
video Louise Armand
with Clémentine Baert, Marine de Missolz, Florence Janas, Laurent Sauvage, Laure Wolf
Production
production Théâtre de Gennevilliers Centre dramatique national de création contemporaine
coproduction Association Cloudbusters, Parc de la Villette, Théâtre du Grütli (Genève)
avec l'aide de la Sacd dans le cadre de son Fonds Musique de Scène