Mystic Composer in a Magical Forest
HALIBURTON, Ontario, Aug. 25 - Richard Wagner had his Bayreuth, with its Festspielhaus specially designed to accommodate his music dramas. And now the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer has the Haliburton Forest and Wildlife Reserve here.
A scene from "Patria." The audience being guided along a trail.
At 72, Mr. Schafer is one of the few Canadian composers to have become known internationally. In the United States, his music has been performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the St. Lawrence String Quartet. His choral music is popular in Scandinavia. He won the Prix International Arthur Honegger for his First String Quartet; and his 10th String Quartet, commissioned by Radio France, is to have its premiere in Paris in February.
These achievements affirm Mr. Schafer's position as a respectable contemporary composer. But beyond his concert works, there is another Murray Schafer: a mystical visionary who inhabits a nameless artistic category of his own creation. For 40 years, he has been writing a huge cycle of 12 music-theater works, collectively titled "Patria." Larger than Wagner's "Ring" cycle or Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Licht," this cycle challenges the boundaries of both music and theater.
Many of the component pieces - like "Patria 9: The Enchanted Forest," which opened a run of eight performances here on Wednesday evening - are unstageable in a theater and must be presented outdoors. To realize his dream of a "wilderness Bayreuth," Mr. Schafer has entered into an agreement with the forester and conservationist Peter Schleifenbaum to mount one "Patria" piece each summer over the next five years in Haliburton Forest, a 60,000-acre tract of land owned by the Schleifenbaum family.
If Mr. Schafer is a modern Wagner, has he found his King Ludwig II of Bavaria? Mr. Schleifenbaum, who was born and educated in Germany, readily grasps the comparison. "Well, first of all, I'm not a madman," he said, laughing. "But to be able to host Murray's work here is an honor. And certainly we'll do what we can to turn Haliburton Forest into the Canadian Bayreuth."
Mr. Schafer explained how the arrangement came about. "I told Peter that I wanted a lake, to start with," he said during a walk in the woods on Wednesday. "And he said, 'O.K., I'll give you a lake.' And I said, 'I want a road into the lake.' And he said, 'O.K., we'll build a road.' And I said that I wanted help creating the infrastructure for some of these pieces that we'll perform. And he said, 'Tell us what you want, and we'll see what we can do.' "
The Haliburton Forest, in central Ontario, is about 200 miles northeast of Toronto, on the southern edge of the vast Algonquin Park. It's far from any major urban area. But to Mr. Schafer, that's the whole point.
"There are some 'Patria' works that are for conventional theaters," he said. "But there are some other works that need a very large space - that make references to nature and that require a quiet environment."
He paused in a clearing and gestured with his hand at the landscape. "If this were to be our playing space, I would say: 'What can you do here? Can we use that shed over there? Can we use those trees over there? Are we going to use the moon? Are we going to use the sun? Where does it rise, and where does it set?' In 'The Enchanted Forest,' when Earth Mother says the sun is setting, it really is."
And so, on Wednesday, about 200 people arrived at Bone Lake, about five miles into the Haliburton Forest. Some were curious locals, some were fans who had driven up from Toronto, and one devotee had traveled from Brazil. "I am so fascinated by Schafer's mythological works," Marisa Fonterrada, a retired professor from São Paulo, said just as the performance began.
Guided along a trail cut through the bush, the audience encounters Earth Mother (Eleanor James, a mezzo-soprano) and other archetypal characters: White Stag (James McLennan, a tenor), Fenris the wolf (Timothy E. Brummund, a baritone) and Murdeth, an evil land developer intent on destroying the forest (Bradley Breckenridge, an actor). Leading the way on the dark, mile-long path is a group of children, seeking their lost friend Ariane (Zorana Sadiq, a soprano). Eventually Ariane is found, transformed into a birch tree.
Magical powers are at work in the forest, protecting it, and Murdeth's plan is foiled. In the final scene, Earth Mother appears on the lake, in a circle of lights, to announce that "the animals want to be your friends, not your slaves." The audience on Wednesday, talkative at the show's opening, left the scene two hours later in silence.
What the audience witnesses is brought about by a team of more than 100 people: singers, actors, musicians (often heard but rarely seen), two children's choruses and a small army of technical workers, operating sophisticated lighting and sound equipment in the wilderness. Mr. Schafer's works are put on by what is, essentially, his own company: Patria Music/Theatre Projects. Joseph Macerollo, the producer and an accordionist, said the budget for "The Enchanted Forest" was about $300,000.
After four decades of creating "Patria," Mr. Schafer has become many things to many people. He has been called an "acoustic ecologist," a sociologist, a visual artist, even a poet. Like Wagner, he writes his own librettos. Musically speaking, he is a stylistic chameleon, with a penchant for delicate and subtle shadings of timbre: in this respect, he could be compared with George Crumb or Toru Takemitsu.
Virtually all of his music is programmatic - "about" something, in some way - and the "Patria" cycle, he has written, is about "the quest for unity and the homeland." For inspiration, he has drawn freely on a wide variety of world mythologies. "Patria 8: The Palace of the Cinnabar Phoenix" (scheduled for performance at the Haliburton Forest next summer) is his "Chinese" piece; "Patria 6: Ra," an "Egyptian" one.
"Patria 7: Asterion," the only part of the cycle not yet finished, is based on the Cretan myth of the Minotaur. When completed, it will be staged in a labyrinth.
Throughout the cycle, characters migrate from one work to another. Sometimes Fenris is simply called Wolf or is thinly disguised as Theseus or Anubis. Ariane is also constantly present, as Ariadne or even the Moon.
The most radical "Patria" work is the cycle's epilogue, "And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon" (also known as the Wolf Project), a mysterious weeklong event that takes place deep in the forest every summer, attended only by selected observer-participants. This is for hard-core Schaferites, some traveling here from the United States, Europe and South America, and predates the five-year agreement.
On the subject of the epilogue, Mr. Schafer tends to be coy. "What we've done in the Wolf Project," he said, "is what happens when you live in a small tribal society for a short time and create your own culture. You can sit around the campfire and drink beer. Or you can say no beer and create your own song repertoire. Everyone can create a song or a rhythm or something, and that's what we do."
