Nguyên Du (1765-1820) composed the Kim Vân Kiêu at the beginning of the 19th century. This masterpiece of more than three thousand verses reflects the Vietnamese soul in all its sensitivity, purity and abnegation. A perfect synthesis of classical Chinese culture and popular Vietnamese customs, this text is considered the foundation of Vietnamese literature. Its plot comes from a Chinese poem, and its versification, typically Vietnamese (alternating verses of 6 and 8 feet) differs from the classic versification inspired by Chinese (verses of 5 and 7 feet).

Its author left the reputation of a melancholy and taciturn man. Mandarin in spite of himself, he fulfilled the duties of his office as well or even better than the others, but he remained, at bottom, a stranger to ambitions. His vocation inclined him to poetry and the novel ; his greatest desire was to retire to the solitude of his village; his great happiness was to hide his talents: "Let those who have talent not glory in their talent!" he says. “The word “tài” [talent] rhymes with the word “tai” [unhappiness]. » In fact, if the author hesitates between Buddhism and Confucianism, it is towards the latter that he leans: « The root of good is in ourselves. The characters of this novel of manners and adventures are now so familiar to the Vietnamese people that, in everyday language, they gave their name to the characters they embody here ».

It is not absurd to think that its author considered himself a prostitute, and told his own story in a roundabout way, under cover of a Chinese poem to which he gave real depth.

The reception of this text has varied according to the times : blacklisted as a subversive writing, an absolute masterpiece, an identity specific to Vietnamese culture... The uninterrupted success of this poem is due to the themes in the purest tradition of Vietnam : the realism and the delicacy of the images, the landscapes where Nguyên Du intensely unites nature with the soul and the soul with nature.

Kiêu, unhappy heroine, is a beautiful and pure young girl of sixteen, who swears loyalty to Kim, a boy of quality. But out of fidelity to the teaching of Confucianism, Kiêu must save her father by becoming a "girl with torn entrails", a courtesan. In doing so, she fulfills her destiny according to Buddhism. However, after more than ten years of hardship, the heroine will find Kim, her former and first love...

About the musical writing and the libretto

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The composition of this work was born from a commission from Mr. Bui Xuan Quang. Its goal is to introduce future generations to this masterpiece of Vietnamese literature. I am highly grateful to him for choosing me as a composer. This honor that falls to me obliges me, to speak in an old-fashioned way, like the characters of this poem. This work of writing will have obliged me, for my greater pleasure and my insatiable curiosity of spirit, to familiarize myself, alas too little, with this rich other culture. The exchanges with my sponsor and Huynh Quôc Tê, the librettist, will have helped me. May they be thanked here. This musical achievement turns out, ultimately, to be neither an opera, nor an oratorio, nor a musical drama. It seemed appropriate to us to define this writing by another denomination little used in lyric poem music, whose parts and sub-parts are called, Songs and sequences.

As usual in my writing, the musical form is “ en spiral ” ; the same motifs recur constantly throughout the work and help to form a kind of continuum. Of course, parts, airs, etc. are heard. in the traditional sense of the terms, but the structural underpinning of the formal organization, characterized by the variants of the same motifs, creates a constant increase in meaning in line with the ambiguity and ambivalence of the characters' feelings.

This version, only with piano " accompaniment ", is of course rich in potential for future orchestration/instrumentation. But it is in no way a “ par avant ” reduction of an orchestral work.

As far as the text is concerned, an update of the very " borrowed " language of the early 19th century was essential. Despite everything, we have voluntarily kept some of the preciousness of this beautiful language and certain peculiarities of the customs of the time, such as the formality between the characters.

The initial text of this poem is structured like a typical 19th century play or opera : 36 characters, choirs of men, women and children… Blood, tears, epic , morality, and tutti quanti ! Simplification - while respecting the letter and the means and situations - was inevitable, within the limits of this order. The essential is, it seems to us, safeguarded.

About the writing of the libretto by Huynh Quôc Tê

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This booklet was born from a rich exchange continued over several months with Bernard de Vienne. Faced with the constraint of collecting in a relatively short piece the 3 254 lines of the original poem by Nguyên Du, strong was first the temptation to adopt a structure " ramifiée_cc781905 -5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_”, made up of backtracking and flash-forwarding, which would have given us more freedom to “ condenser ” the intrigue, to fit together the dramatic and musical situations as we please. Reason finally prevailed and a temporally linear narrative was retained, not however exempt from ellipses when this does not harm comprehension.

We wanted to satisfy a few points deemed essential, in particular :

- involve all the main characters, do not forget those who have become common archetypes in Vietnam ;

- update the dialogues while keeping as much as possible to the language its typical Vietnamese. There is indeed a Vietnamese Francophonie, which illustrious authors, of Vietnamese and French culture, have brought to perfection during the course of the 20th century : a search for vocabulary, grammatical particular prosodies (variable from North to South), a precise positioning of the speaker and the commentator which, in my opinion, stems from the Confucian background that slumbers in every Vietnamese.

Distribution of creation

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Norma Nahoun : Soprano 1

Nathalie Pannier : Soprano 2

Camille Merckx : Viola

Guillaume François : Tenor

Etienne Chevallier : Bass Baritone

Stanislas de la Tousche : Narrator

Tran Ngoc Nguyen Trinh : piano

Characters and Cast

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light soprano

• Thuy Kiêu, eldest daughter of the Vuong family

Lyric Soprano 

• Tù Bà : madam mother, brothel owner and wife of Ma Giam Sinh

• Mme Vuong : mother of Quan, Kiêu and Vân

• Giac Duyên : monk/superior of Solitude's Call Pagoda

• Thuy Vân : sister of Kiêu

Contralto 

• Dam Tiên : deceased singer, famous for her beauty and talent

• Ma Kiêu : a courtesan, friend of Kiêu in the house of joy (brothel)

• Hoan Thu : wife of Thuc

Tenor 

• Kim Trong : young scholar from a good family, Kiêu's first love

• Thuc Sinh : husband of Hoan Thu and 2nd “ husband ” of Kiêu

• Ma Giam Sinh : husband of Tù Bà and 1st « mari » of Kiêu

• So Khan : frivolous man, ally of Tù Bà

Bass-Baritone

• Tù Hai : warrior chief, 3rd “ mari ” of Kiêu

• Mr. Vuong : Bourgeois, father of Kiêu, Vân and Quan 

• Vuong Quan : brother of Kiêu

• A messenger

All (except soprano I)

• Wandering souls (like Dam Tiên, deities who comment on the action for the audience. No one hears them except Kiêu)

• The monks and monks in prayer

• The crowd

• The waves

• The inhabitants of the house of joy

Narrator (perhaps provided by the Baritone-Bass)

• Role of Nguyên Du, poet

FORM OF THE WORK

CANTO I : Young Kiêu

CANTO II : The carnal trials

CANTO III : The death of Kiêu

CHANT IV : The transfiguration of Kiêu

EPILOGUE