Brian Slattery Photo
Chevan.
A political scandal shot through with prejudice and identity politics drives a society into two polarized camps. People have to pick sides, and when they do, friendships are shattered. Sound familiar?
It could be pulled from our headlines. But it also describes what happened over 100 years ago in France during the Dreyfus affair — the subject of “Letters from the Affair,” a project conceived by musician David Chevan and composed by him and the rest of the Afro-Semitic Experience. The group will perform “Letters” for the first time at Best Video Film and Cultural Center on Aug. 16.
“I’m always looking around for ideas for projects,” Chevan said. Many years ago he attended a chamber opera that told a story about the Holocaust. “It really struck me how very un-Jewish these supposed Jewish characters’ music was,” he said. It got him thinking: “What if you created a work in which one of the ways Jewish identity was presented was through music?”
But what story would this work tell? Chevan let the idea marinate. Then, about a decade ago, he read a book review in the New Yorker — “because I’m an intellectual snob,” he said — written by Adam Gopnik about Louis Begley’s Why The Dreyfus Affair Matters.
Cover of La Libre Parole, an anti-Semitic newspaper.
The Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal in turn-of-the-last-century France in which French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus was charged, in 1894, with selling military secrets to Germany and convicted of treason. In some French papers, the alleged actions of Dreyfus, who was Jewish, were taken as a symptom of the disloyalty of French Jews to France. However, as Dreyfus served his sentence, further evidence suggested he was innocent. Another officer was accused, put on trial, and acquitted. As outrage over Dreyfus’s sentencing grew, a court-martial revisited his case in 1899 and found him guilty again. By this time the case was such a scandal that the president of the republic pardoned him. But the scandal’s damage was severe. It laid bare the anti-Semitism in French society and made French politics more divisive and radicalized.
As Chevan learned, the affair “really ripped the public in half,” he said. “There are enormous parallels to our times.”
Chevan started to do some research of his own. One of the relationships strained to the breaking point, he learned, was between painters Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro. Degas and Pissarro at the time were leading lights of the French art world and colleagues. But as the scandal over the Dreyfus Affair heated up, Degas became more outspoken in his anti-Semitism. The leftist Pissarro, meanwhile, rediscovered his Jewish identity.
“Politics force you to confront who you are, and that really happened for both of these artists in different ways,” Chevan said.
A strong disagreement between them developed, and this being the 19th century, it played out in letters Degas and Pissarro wrote, some to each other, some to others.
“This isn’t the story of the Dreyfus affair. It’s a Dreyfus affair story,” Chevan said. “It’s about two people who started out as friends, and then the Dreyfus affair comes along, and all of a sudden there are these letters where Degas says, ‘I’ll have time for anti-Semitic conversation’ after his time at the spa … and then Pisarro disparages the anti-Dreyfus movement saying ‘they have nothing inside.’”
Degas with his maid; the painter had his maid read anti-Semitic newspapers aloud to him while he ate breakfast.
Newspapers also played a role. “There was an article published in a Paris newspaper in January 1899 that talks about how Degas was working with a model, and the model expressed some pro-Dreyfus sympathy, and Degas told the model to leave,” Chevan said.
Pissarro read the article. A couple days later the two painters ran into each other at a gallery opening for one of Degas’s students. After that day, they never spoke again.
“The only thing I don’t know is what they said to each other,” Chevan said.
Pissarro died a few years later. “So he has passed away, the poor old wandering Jew,” Degas wrote to a friend. “And that’s not even the end of the story,” Chevan said. He didn’t want to spoil it, but did say that “you dream for an ending like this.”
Pissarro with his sons.
Chevan was taken with the story, but “I struggled with drafting different kinds of libretto for a while,” he said. Other projects intervened. Then he realized “I’m trying to invent dialogue for these two people, and I’m sitting on a treasure trove,” he said, in the form of the artists’ letters. “With a little bit of narration, I have the story.”
Chevan set about putting the painters’ words to music, tapping into the traditions of jazz and klezmer that he’d been steeped in for years. “One of the things I wanted to do through the music was to create a sense of Jewish identity, both positively and negatively, through the music I write for the characters.”
“I decided to approach it as writing songs that I feel in some way capture what they’re saying,” he continued. There were formal challenges: “Some of what I had to deal with was finding places where words could be repeated and turned into hooks,” he said.
Other decisions were more thematic. “The very last letter Degas writes is so anti-Semitic that I decided to make it cantorial, so the Jewish elements would stand in contrast to what he was saying,” Chevan said. “And then there’s this love song, because every musical should have a love song. But it’s a love song that a father writes to his son.”
That father would be Pissarro. One of his sons died of tuberculosis; the letter in question was one Pissarro wrote to an older son who was slowly recovering from a brain infection at the time. Pissarro wrote about how throwing himself into his work helped him deal with his grief. “‘I want you to wrap yourself up in art,’” Pissarro wrote. “That’s my love song,” Chevan said.
On Thursday, the Afro-Semitic Experience will perform that and six other pieces, all telling the story of Degas and Pissarro. It will be accompanied by projections of text from the letters and visuals — photographs of the two painters, newspaper clippings, and other artifacts from the era.
“I treat this as a work in progress,” Chevan said. He would love to see a full production. “What it is right now is a song cycle that should be sung by two different singers.” But on Thursday fellow bandmate Warren Byrd will cover all the bases. “He has to embrace Pissarro and sing as Pissarro, and then embrace Degas and sing as Degas.”
Chevan will make a video and audio recording of the show as a document with which to approach theaters and production companies. But meanwhile, there is already the music, and the painters’ words, with its all-too-apparent parallels — and warnings — for today.
The Afro-Semitic Experience performs “Letters from the Affair” at Best Video Film and Cultural Center, 1842 Whitney Ave., in Hamden at 7:30 p.m. on Aug. 16. A talkback with the band will follow the performance. See Best Video’s website for more information.
Click on the video to watch a sampling from the new project that the group previewed earlier this month at a Westville concert.
