This is the concert version of the score composed for Alain Françon's 1991 staging of Racine's Britannicus at the Théâtre du Huitième in Lyon and the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre.
Music played an important role in this production, the electric guitar depicting Nero's adolescent instability, his longing for independence, his fascination with his own power. Outside: the Empire, brass.
I liked this mixture of heterogeneous timbres for its effectiveness and, when all is said and done, its novelty. The guitar part is written in the tradition handed down by Hendrix and continued by Jeff Beck: violent, lyrical, saturated. The mix of certain harmonic ritornelli from the pre-Baroque age and blues phrasing brings seemingly opposed eras closer together: I like to imagine that music escapes the notion of a rectilinear historical progress towards ever-greater verity and reason. Here, the simplicity of the writing allows for every note to be weighted with a maximum of expression, as in Baroque technique. It is therefore an energetic, theatrical, expressionistic work, which joins other works in my catalogue like Les Menteries du Style and No Progress in Arts, in a "neoprebarock" vein. (May musicologists forgive me this neologism.)
Writing about this music in Le Monde, Bernadette Bost stated that it "convokes the vestiges of a 17th century whose monuments would have been fractured by contemporary tempests". That's fairly accurate.
