Jake Heggie’s song cycle Camille Claudel: Into the Fire, for mezzo and string quartet, was written for Joyce DiDonato and the Alexander Quartet, who gave its premiere in San Francisco in 2012. Heggie, born in 1961, has become a song composer of choice for many of today’s leading singers, and DiDonato, long associated with his work, has now brought Camille Claudel to London, with the Brentano Quartet replacing the Alexanders, as part of her Artist Spotlight series at the Barbican and Milton Court.
It’s a puzzling piece in some respects. Camille Claudel (1864-1943), a sculptor of exceptional talent, Rodin’s mistress, and sister of the diplomat-poet Paul Claudel, was confined in a mental institution in 1913 after being diagnosed as schizophrenic, though some have questioned whether she was ill at all. Heggie thinks not, and his song cycle, to texts by Gene Scheer, imagines Camille on her last day of freedom, contemplating her work, and obsessively reliving the collapse of her affair with Rodin. The final song flashes forward to 1929, when she received a visit from the British sculptor Jessie Lipscomb, one of the many who believed her to be sane.
It’s immaculately tailored to DiDonato’s voice, with its remarkable flexibility and expressive range. Coloratura flourishes suggest Camille’s volatility. Long lines, full of immaculate pianissimos, convey her retreat into a private world of memory. Yet it also comes dangerously close to pastiche. The performance was prefaced by Debussy’s String Quartet, played with tense beauty by the Brentanos, and Hahn’s ravishing Venezia, which DiDonato has made her own, with Heggie himself her weighty, persuasive accompanist. His song cycle places Camille’s tragedy in its Belle Epoque context, by drawing on the idiom of both works, the Debussy particularly. It’s beautiful, but very retro and, at times, lacking in originality.
