Denis Levaillant
A Little Trifle

© Julie Levaillant


A Little Trifle

Melodrama for piano and voice, based on the book by Maurice Roche, Un petit rien-du-tout tout neuf plié dans une feuille de persil (Editions Gallimard)

First performed at the Théâtre du Rond-Point, Paris, 14 March-1 April 2006, by the composer and Irina Dalle, in a staging by Caterina Gozzi

« Maurice Roche, who died in 1997, had been a very dear friend since 1972 (the year I turned 20 and gave my first public concerts). I set his texts (my first chamber opera, Le Baigneur, which I premiered in 1982 with Michel Hermon, is adapted from one of his books, Opéra Bouffe) and exchanged many emotions, thoughts and music with him. He liked my piano work and was very interested in all new music: he had in fact studied composition at the Paris Conservatoire and begun a musical career (composing the music for the premiere of Pichette's Epiphanies with Gérard Philipe and Maria Casarès). Music would remain one of his essential preoccupations throughout his life, to the extent that it was, I believe, a constituent of his literary creation. He was also fascinated by Monteverdi and all the pre-Baroque composers, something else that contributed to bringing us closer.

I was quite touched by his final book, Un petit rien-du-tout tout neuf plié dans une feuille de persil (Gallimard). This monologue of the writer at the end of his life, recalling the child he had been, is doubtless his most accessible, most emotional text. It is both funny and moving, profound and diabolical, as was Maurice.


I adapted it for the stage in the form of a monologue accompanied by music, like a modern melodrama, a small, recited ‘opera’ accompanied by a piano. This piano/voice form, which I had already experimented with using another of his texts (Portrait de l’Artiste, with Caroline Gautier, performed in Geneva and Paris), is, I feel, well adapted to his universe. In fact, it seems to me that the piano is perpetually hinted at in his books and that melodrama, where the voice is constantly guided by the music, enables the spectator to plunge into the intimacy of his writing.

For Roche, childhood was a place of absolute truth: listening to him, you have the impression of having never been so intelligent, perspicacious and lucid about the human condition as when you were a child. And it is written with such elegance that everyone can feel moved by this account and recognise our destiny in this caustic vision.

We often wanted to adapt his texts for the stage, him reciting, me playing the piano. Having had the unfortunate idea of dying, he will not hold it against me if I prolong his voice with that of the lovely actress Irina Dalle and dedicate this performance to our long friendship.'

DENIS LEVAILLANT

Press book (excerpts) :


Le Figaro - 26 March 2006

Denis Levaillant, who has always been ready for innovative theatrical or choreographic adventures, was a friend of Maurice Roche’s, and in this brief, delicate show, we find the full power of affection and admiration.

The lovely, animated Irina Dalle has the mischievousness that is appropriate for Maurice Roche: that mocking sentimentality and seriousness hidden behind the jokes.

Roche’s text is quite beautiful, very touching and very funny. It is a lovely moment, elegant and refined, that is offered to us, and we shouldn’t refuse it.

Armelle Hélio

Elle - 20 March 2006

Denis Levaillant has written a joyous marche macabre. Accompanied by actress Irina Dalle, Levaillant chants, recites and sings this tender and trash ‘Poil de carotte’*. The pianist-actress duo is as poetic and violent as the dialogue between the narrator and orchestra in Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat. This is a fine way of giving new life to a sickly kid, musician and writer, born on the Day of the Dead, 2 November 1924.

It is also a fine way of questioning the mechanism of memory and immersing ourselves in childhood again, real childhood—full of anguishes and wonderment, shame and desires.

Sandra Bash

*Translator’s note: A French classic by Jules Renard, published in 1894, about an unloved boy nicknamed ‘Poil de carotte’ on account of his red hair.

Impact Medecine

This show teems with freshness, tenderness and fantasy moulded on Irina Dalle. This actress-singer-mime-dancer is grace incarnate. In duo with composer-pianist Denis Levaillant, she embodies the precariousness of the childhood of writer Maurice Roche and his candour, insolence and fantasy. At the piano, Denis Levaillant provides a piquant, serious counterpoint. All three of them lead us into the spellbinding magic of childhood. It lasts an hour, and we wish it would never end.

Testimony by Salim Jay, writer and friend of Maurice Roche


I have something to say about this work, which is a bit difficult to admit: by my tastes as a spectator as well as a reader, this is the happiest show I have ever seen in my whole life!

Weightiness sustains a defeat, and grace is afraid of getting a slap in the face, but no! The laughter is not sly. All perfidy suddenly cancelled; here is the music of being in the world, played in keeping with a kid’s fantasy, and his astonishments recited like a carpet of oxymoron unfolds. Between the putative old man and the child who has become chimerical, on the canvas where Maurice Roche reigns, the sound show composed and played by Denis Levaillant welcomes a dancer whose movements suggest calligraphy: Irina Dalle.

Just as the sense is manifold, and the memory a way of forgetting one area or another, the show makes memory and disappearance come bursting forth, the visible and the not-knowing, old disgusts and new threats, immemorial, to make you crafty.

And yet this is music, from a whistling prank into submerging silence. All the joy of living in a sprig of parsley? Is chewing really the solution? A chemistry of affects and events reinvents the passage on earth as a danceable, undanceable summary. In Denis Levaillant, Maurice Roche’s personality has found an interpreter who pulls his own weight with the loyalty of an expert-handed accomplice. In what? That is the question!


Salim Jay