sarma

In each bulletin we shall be nosing around in an artist’s ‘library’, the reservoir from which their work is fuelled. The series opens with Alain Franco, a musician and conductor born in Antwerp and brought up in French. From his grandfather he inherited a passion for German culture: the literature, the philosophy and the music.

‘I am not really an inveterate reader; I don’t have anything like a favourite book or piece of music I want to read or listen to again and again, but I have noticed that I recurringly turn to the poems of René Char. I have read the complete works of the nineteenth-century German author Theodor Fontane, who wrote about a world that no longer exists. I read that with as much pleasure as the works of Marcel Proust. But I read more sociological works, and a little philosophy, than novels or short stories. I prefer to explore a piece by Plato than one or other novel. I also go for recently published works, mainly in the philosophical-sociological area. I recently read a book by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck on the challenges of globalisation, and La civilisation des médias by the twentieth-century Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser. I am not really part of that world, nor am I really involved in those matters, but I do consider it necessary to stay informed about them, and to confront them for myself. I can’t imagine that anyone engaged in their own development at the present time should hide away from that world. I find it necessary to let myself be touched by the world and to let the wound thus created ‘ooze’. I mean that in a positive sense: an oozing wound enables the world to penetrate straight inside.

I don’t actually listen to much music, because I play for myself rather than listen. On a Sunday afternoon I find it more fun to pick up a collection by Liszt – just as one might pick up a weighty volume – and spend three hours at the piano reading the music as I play it. This is not like giving a concert or an exercise or technical preparation, but simply reading music as one would a book. I have as many scores at home as I have books: they include contemporary works, but also older ones and even some very early ones.

As far as films are concerned I have a strong preference for the French avant-garde: Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais and of course Jean-Luc Godard. It is no coincidence that they are all film auteurs who hover between the worlds of literature and music. I don’t really keep up with art. I often have a problem with theatre-makers who see the image as the essence of theatre. I am not interested in the brilliance and illusion of the image, with its glitter and dazzle.

I have not constructed ‘a central edifice’ in the course of my reading. There are people who as their lives move on are able to say that something is the essence around which everything revolves. I think in our era it is in any case by no means simple to put together this sort of central edifice. It is precisely because the world has changed so much that I can now understand why I go back to a work like Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, which dates from what one might call the ‘stone age’. What I am interested in is the reality of the subject matter stored within that work: the work forces you to confront this subject matter. That’s what I appreciate so much in such theatre-makers as Ivo Van Hove and Peter van Kraaij: that constant return to the stalemate between both the trial of strength and the subject matter. It seems good to me to tackle these matters again and again: they lie hidden in and will perhaps even disappear in our era, swallowed up by the acceleration of our world. But at one time or another they will have to come back to the surface again, just as one of the spaceships always has to crash into a planet in SF films. This leads to a clash, which makes a noise, and it is precisely this abrupt restriction of speed that reminds us of the materiality of reality, and of the existence of that planet. This music of Bach’s is there, it exists, you can’t just push it aside. We shall be faced with both its disappearance and its return. I wonder how future generations will deal with it. And even if it doesn’t return, I am still curious about how it doesn’t, how they will deal with immateriality, how they will translate into image or picture what in the past was matter.’