The Death of Don Juan

Elodie Lauten has lived and worked in New
York since the early seventies. She has
taught on the composition faculty at New
York University and writes for the classical
music internet publication Sequenza21 . She
is a member of the boards of the American
Festival of Microtonal Music and Lower East
Side Performing Arts, and is a writer/publisher member of ASCAP.
Born October 20, 1950 in Paris, France, Lauten was classically trained as a pianist since
age 7 and is primarily self-taught in musical
composition. A writer of operas, orchestral,
chamber and instrumental music, as well as
electronic and electro-acoustic music, Elodie
Lauten is recognized in North America and
Europe as a pioneer of postminimalism and
has releases on a number of labels including
Lovely Music Ltd., Point/Polygram, 4-Tay,
0 .0. Discs, Unseen Worlds and New Tone.
Her piano work Variations On The Orange Cycle ( 1991) is included in Chamber Music America's
list of 100 best works of the 20th Century.
This recording of The Death of Don Juan was funded by a grant from the National Endowment
for the Arts, Opera/Musical Theater Program. Originally composed in 1984 and subsequently
released in 1985 as CC713 on Cat Collectors Productions. Cover art by John Massey. Lauten
portraits by Marcus Leatherdale, back cover, and Milton Fletcher, this page. Special thanks to
Gregor Capodieci, Public Access Synthesizer Studio, Dr. John Gilbert, New York University.
Produced for rerelease by Unseen Worlds Records, P.O. Box 644, Austin, TX, 78767-0644
All rights reserved. © 2008 Elodie Lauten/Studio 21 (ASCAP) elodielauten.net- unseenworlds.net
THE DEATH OF DON JUAN
An opera in two acts
OVERTURE
Fairlight CMI , amplified harpsichords
ACT C SCENE I- VISION
Fairlight CMI , Trine*, electric guitar, cello
PERFORMERS
Randi Larowitz, Soprano voice
Elodie Lauten, Fairlight CMI , harpsichord, trine, alto and contralto
.
VOICeS
ACT I SCENE II -DEATH AS A SHADOW
Fairlight CMI , contralto, alto and soprano voices
I
ACT C SCENE III- DON JUAN ENLIGHTENED
Fairlight CMI , trombone, chorus
PRELUDE
Trine
ACT II SCENE I -DEATH AS A WOMAN
Fairlight CMI , cello, harpsichord, trombone, tenor
and alto voices
I
ACT IC SCENE II- DUEL
Fairlight CMI , trombone, cello
ACT IC SCENE III - DESPAIR
Fairlight CMI , Trine, cello, electric guitar, spoken
voices simultaneously
ACT IC SCENE IV - KYRIE
Fairlight CMI , chorus, soprano voice
Bill Raynor, Electric guitar
Arthur Russell, Cello, tenor voice
Steven Sauber, Bass voice, spoken
.
VOICe
Peter Zummo, Trombone
ENGINEERS
Barry Diament, Digital editing
Elliot Federman, Digital mastering
Tom Gordon, 2008 Digital remaster
Carlo Parkinson, Fairlight recording
Steven Sauber, Recording
Brooks Williams, Recording
Music and libretto, Elodie Lauten
Production, Elodie Lauten
*The Trine is an electro-acoustic
lyre designed for the opera by
Elodie Lauten
Synopsis:
The Death of Don Juan is an opera of consciousness, about the myth rather than the story of Don
Juan. In this work he is an archetype, a symbol of the desire for freedom and transcendence.
At the beginning of the opera we find Don Juan, a contemporary artist, sitting with his
back to the audience, watching the events of his life on a screen and totally absorbed in
his thoughts. He is interrupted by a vision: Death appears to him in the form of a woman
partially hidden by a veil. She reminds Don Juan of many women he has known, but she also
represents a new aspect of the Female principle - that of Divine Mother. Between this figure
and Don Juan an ambiguous relationship develops, somewhere between passion and destruction, death and redemption . Their encounter is a meeting not only of male and female, but
also of Heaven and Earth, Yin and Yang. Death speaks to him in tongues and her multiple
voices (sung in different languages) are those of the women he seduced. Powerless against
Death, this confrontation with the female entity is a role reversal for Don Juan .
He tells her of his willingness to change and his desire for her to be the agent of his transformation . But to complete his ascension to the emotions of the heart, he has to first overcome his powerful ego. He begins to realize how barren he has made his life. As he struggles
with thoughts of unfulfilled love and self-destruction, other voices surround him, repeating a
series of apparently random words. Don Juan is undergoing a complete explosion of his mental patterns. His mind struggles with self-destruction and insanity. Only by breaking through
the wall of insanity will he reach enlightenment.
The Kyrie reflects Don Juan's final enlightenment. //Kyrie eleision" - Lord, have mercy - is
the mantra of deliverance and forgiveness sung by the soprano, expressing the peace of death.
Only then is he able to understand the need for love, compassion, purity, sincerity, all of
which he once found trivial. This awakening is his salvation . There is no hell for Don Juan.
He is able to forgive himself and be forgiven in a cathartic ritual.
LIBRETTO
ACT I, SCENE II
DEATH AS A SHADOW
Death as a Shadow,
Four voices:
Contralto voice
]e suis Ia Mort
Devenue plus humaine
Ta derniere chance
D'atteindre l'Etre Pur
~Etre Pur
]e suis Ia Mort
Ta Mort supreme
Et je t'attends
Toujours fidele
Sans impatience
]e suis ta Mort
Ta Mort fidele
~humaine
en moi
Me d it que tu vas vivre
La Mort en moi me dit
Que tu t'es detruit
Par plaisir
Spoken voice
Soprano voice
I am your Death
Death am I I
Your Death am I
Unsterblichkeit
Fur immer unci ewig
lch bin ein Tod
Ein Erde
lch werde wieder menschlich
Unaufhorlich
Leben Seele
Ewigkeit
Fur immer unci ewig
Your faithful Death
Death am I I
Becoming human again
Death am I I
Last chance to reach purity
Your Death
Faithful Death your Death
The human in me says
You will live
Death in me says
You have destroyed your self
Self destroy self
Self Death I am
The human in me says
You are forgiven
Death in me says
You are forgiven
Death in me says
You will suffer
The Supreme in me says
You will forget your past
Death I am
Pleasure Death I am
I am I I
Death am I
I am your Death
Alto voice
Io sono Ia tua ezistenza
II tuo mutamento
Io son oil tuo illuminismo
Aspettare
Continuare
Pronto, preparato
lnfinito, eterno
AI momento della tua morte
ACT I, SCENE III
DON JUAN
ENLIGHTENED
.
a-e- 1-o
Death as a Woman, Alto Voice
\
'
Elodie Lauten and Arthur Russel/ at LaMama
Beyond life I change
Change
My life
Your life
I change
Action ends
Lost you are left
Insane
Only I change
Action life
Becoming the desire
ACT II, SCENE I
DEATH AS A WOMAN
Don Juan, Tenor Voice
Change my life
I change
Life for your
I change
Your love end
I change
Love ends
I change
Island world
Double self
Action doubt
Lost
I am left
Insane
Becoming the desire
Hour after hour
ACT II, SCENE III
DESPAIR
Don Juan, Spoken voice
The memory
Of our meeting
Was present
So vividly
I kept seeing
Your expression
When you left
Follow the line
Of least resistance
Fear
The fifth dimension
The one I imagine
There was a dream
A dream of you
Like an astral visit
Overcome by a longing
Despair
The little boy
Cut his hand
He is bleeding
You have not
Chosen me
I struggle with
The absurd thought of
Taking my life
While acting
Completely integrated
If only I can look
Like I am OK
Keeping up the appearance
As if everything were
In place
Then the reality of my
Despair
Becomes so hidden I can
Almost forget about it
Ignoring the thought
As unimportant
Is the key
I abandon my feeling
A tense violin string
Throw it into the Infinite
With all my gathered
strength
Out of myself
Merge into silence
Somewhere ahead
Spoken voice 1
Spoken voice 3
Danger
Data
Erase
Into messages
Pages torn
Stop desire
Utter cry
Work
Always
Active task
Non-existence
Garden
Time
Ready
Being
Time stop
Outside
Action
Life
Mine again
Empty
Available
Suffer
Doubt
Help
Land
Water
Broken
ACT II, SCENE IV
KYRIE
Kyrie Eleiso n (Lord Have M ercy)
,
Spoken voice 2
Unfold
I am
Endless
Broken sign
Hopeless
Doubt
Check data
Information
No
Cry
Satisfied
Leben
Evig
Evichkeit
Kyrie,
Visual score
Cosmically Hip: The Death of Don Juan
By Kyle Gann
It was 1986. The rush of excitement over the advent of minimalism had subsided. The orchestra and opera house (yawn) had co-opted Steve Reich and Philip Glass, La Monte Young was
in seclusion, Terry Riley was singing Indian ragas. What next?, was the question that seemed to
hang in the air. And into that lull poured Elodie Lauten's The Death of Don Juan.
How this self-produced record from Lauten's tiny New York label Cat Collectors came to
my attention in Chicago I don't even remember. But it generated an excitement in me greater
than any new music had since classic minimal ism started going south. The Death of Don Juan had
a certain obvious relationship to minimalism, but the feeling was very different. It was both
more whimsical and darker, more personal and mysterious. "Your Death am I I Your faithful
Death," it chanted, with a startling departure from minimalism's upbeat reassurances. Don Juan
consigned to hell by a woman this time. Mozart reinterpreted.
I enthused in the Chicago Reader. Soon afterward I got a job in New York. Lauten was one
of the first composers I wrote about there, and one of the first people I looked up. I had to meet
this woman who could kill off Don Juan through psychic powers.
Now twenty years have passed. Lauten's career never achieved the visibility I thought it
deserved. The Death of Don Juan remains an underground classic. To an extent she and it are
symptomatic of our generation in that respect - our artists have never been allowed to take our
place as "the adults" of the new cultural scene.
More than that, Lauten turned out to be a presence as mystical as her music. She disappears
from the world periodically, and reappears with a new work- I almost think of her as Erda
from Wagner's Ring, vanishing into the earth and ascending at crucial moments with Truth
on her lips. Her music has taken many aspects. The Death of Don Juan turned out to be only one
facet. Deus ex Machina is for Baroque ensemble, and its textures are almost neoclassical. Waking in
New York blends gospel, Broadway, and classical styles. Variations on the Orange Cycle is a virtuosic
improv. Tronik Involutions is sparkly electronic music based in complex, universal hierarchal
systems.
In short, it was simply going to take a long time to register the full complexity of Lauten's
musical world. The Death of Don Juan was in a sense her breakthrough work, but unlike Reich's
Drumming or Glass's Music in Twelve Parts, it wasn't a signature piece to pin her style down by. It
was a tantalizing and reliable first listen into her universe. Within it already was revealed her
continuum between clear-cut repetition and misty, droning stasis, the sense of catchy tunes
that can vanish into a meditative void. The sense that the music was meant to come out and
seduce you back into some preconscious state was already full-formed.
Today the world has changed, and The Death of Don Juan is a window into Lauten's origins
in the underground culture of '70s Manhattan. After all, back then she sang female lead for
a band called Flaming Youth, shaved her head before it was fashionable, interviewed James
Brown for Fa<;ade magazine, played at CBGB's with the Ramones and Talking Heads, performed in Michel Auder videos with Taylor Mead, and performed and for a while lived with
poet Allen Ginsberg. She was hip. And it turned out she wasn't just superficially hip, as being
"in the moment," but cosmically hip, as in: even deeper today than she seemed back then .
Notes on Elodie Lauten's The Death of Don Juan
By John Schaefer (New Sounds, WNYC)
'Then came the romantic man, the Artist, with his love songs and his paintings and his poemsi and with him I had great delight for many years, and some profiti for I cultivated my
senses for his sakei and his songs taught me to hear better, his paintings to see better, and
his poems to feel more deeply. But he led me at last to the worship of Woman .. . I thanked
him for teaching me to use my eyes and earsi but I told him that his beauty worshipping
and happiness hunting and woman idealizing was not worth a dump as a philosophy of
11.fe.
-Don Juan, from Man And Superman by George Bernard Shaw
II
Don Juan has undergone a startling transformation over the years. Born in the imagination of
a Spanish monk in the 16th century, he has been the inspiration to literally dozens of composers- to say nothing of the poets and the authors who've fallen under his spell . But it's never
the same Don Juan. Elodie Lauten's central character is a far cry from the irresistibly attractive
womanizer of El Burlador de Sevilla. Even by the time of Mozart's Don Giovanni, the simple moralizing of the early Don Juan stories had evolved into a Promethean tale of one man's defiance of
God. In the century between Mozart and the next great step in Don Juan's evolution, George
Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, the swaggering rake was transformed almost beyond recognition: Don Juan became as much a Romantic favorite as Faust or Manfred. No longer was he
simply a fellow who knew how to have a good timei instead, he was updated and made into
an archetype of human behavior- his search for the perfect, ideal Woman (never achieved,
of course) leading him from one unsatisfactory liaison to another. By the time Shaw got hold
of him, we find Don Juan in HelC having a pretty miserable time of it ... because while those
around him are enjoying themselves, he's more suited to the contemplation of beauty and
perfection in Heaven, to which he finally decides to go.
Elodie Lauten's Don Juan picks up where Shaw's left off. Despite a brief historical setting in
Act II, he's certainly not an 18th-century philanderer, but he's not quite a contemporary figure
either. He's placed in a timeless setting, and all of the "action" takes place inside his consciousness. Whether he's actually had his mille e tre affairs in the past is beside the pointi Lauten's Don
Juan is not the embodiment of human lust, as in the Mozart opera. Instead, he's the personi-
fication of the struggle between man's conflicting desires: his basic, physical desires and his
higher, artistic ideals.
Lauten is a composer who likes to work with ambiguity. Using elements of Sa tie-like lyricism, Minimalist keyboard patterns, brooding electronics, gentle Impressionism, and tapes of
everyday noises, she has fashioned an appealing, if unlikely, musical language. Lauten's music
blurs the distinctions between acoustic and electronic sounds, between music and noise, and
between reality and fantasy. The Death of Don Juan especially reflects her concern for combining
real and surreal imagery; the staging employs both "live" characters and visual projections. Like
the setting, the music in The Death of Don Juan is highly atmospheric, preferring to hi nt or suggest rather than describe in detail. The view is a soft-focussed one, as for example in the third
scene of Act I, when a shadowy effect results from the combination of taped and live voices.
Similarly, in Act II's "Despair," a jumble of voices suggests Don Jua n's mental breakdown far
better than the usual operatic silliness where a person who's going crazy actually takes time out
the sing about it.
In her first two albums, Piano Works and Concerto for Piano attd Orchestral Memory, noise played
as much a part in Lauten's music as it does in our lives, lending a touch of realism you don't
often fi nd on recordings. Here, in a fantasy setting, the technique isn't as prominent, though
echoes of that practice turn up occasionally. Without the contrast between music and found
sound, the dichotomy of this work is probably best demonstrated by the Trine, a triangular
amplified lyre designed by Elodie Lauten. Aside from its purpose in the story as the instrument
of Don Juan's enlightenment, the trine combines the sound of the lyre - one of the simplest,
most ancient instruments- with amplification and processing; it's a primitive instrument whose
sound is modern, or like Don Juan himself, timeless.
Is The Death of Don Juan an opera? Puccini it's not, but these days, who can say what's an
opera and what isn't? Robert Wilson and Philip Glass's Einstein On The Beach and Robert Ashley's
Perfect Lives or Atalanta are even farther from the conventional operatic structures than Lauten's
work, yet these are all labeled as operas. T he word "opera," after all, means simply "work" (or
"works" in the o riginal Lati n), which leaves lots of room for interpretation. Works nowadays
are whatever their composers choose to call them. Its instrumentation and use of the voice
may be unusual, but The Death of Don Juan is an opera, albeit in a new, original guise. And for
all its ambiguity, the work is something else, too: a story of an artist's search for sincerity, and
thus a parable of the artist in modern times.