A Living Requiem

In 1598 the world’s first opera, Dafne, was composed by Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini, who based his libretto on an earlier one: “Combattimento di Apollo col serpente Pitone.” The “Combattimento” had been performed nine years before as an intermedio during the marriage celebration of Ferdinando I de’ Medici and Cristina di Lorena in Florence. Intermedii—lavish theatrical performances staged on extravagant sets—were a favorite entertainment of the aristocracy, particularly on special occasions. They involved song, speech, and music, but not all at the same time. With Dafne, Peri found a way to keep his performers singing throughout the performance, using a new style called stile recitativo, or recitative.

Peri’s goal, in his words, was “to make a simple test of what the song of our time was capable of.” The dynamics of recitative, however, are far from simple. They involve producing a calculated dissonance between the vocal melody and its musical accompaniment. Instead of following the composition’s melody, the singer recites the libretto according to the rhythms and accents of spoken language. By playing with the conflict and consonance between the libretto and the score, Peri found, he said, “a new harmony” that might capture the full range of human emotion.

Dafne is both a novelty and a mimicry. It is based on a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, about the sun deity Apollo and the nymph Daphne. After defeating the dragon-snake Python, Apollo insults Cupid, the “little, naked, and blind” god of love, by telling him to leave bows and arrows to big gods like him. To prove his own superior strength, Cupid shoots Apollo with an arrow that causes him to love Daphne, and Daphne with an arrow that causes her to hate Apollo. Apollo chases Daphne; Daphne runs away. In Ovid’s telling, she begs her father, a river god, for help. He turns her into a laurel tree, which Apollo then claims as his own. “Always on my golden brow,” Rinuccini’s Apollo says, “will your leaves and branches make a garland”—a reference to the Greco-Roman custom of using laurel wreaths as a symbol of triumph.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses includes over two hundred and fifty myths of transformation. An outstanding number of them are stories about sexual violence. Daphne, in flight from Apollo, becomes a tree; the nymph Syrinx, on the run from the satyr Pan, is changed into a cluster of reeds, which Pan then uses to make his pipes. Another nymph, Arethusa, turns into a stream to escape the river god Alpheus, who, undeterred, forcibly joins his waters to hers. “The underside of culture,” as the late literary critic Fredric Jameson once put it, “is blood, torture, death, and terror.” Ovid’s poem is an example of this tragic interdependence and a requiem for its victims.

Nour Mobarak’s Dafne Phono is in the Ovidian tradition. A large-scale installation in the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio at the Museum of Modern Art, this Dafne is spoken, sung, and chanted by recorded voices emerging from fifteen sculptures made of mycelium, or living fungal tissue. These elemental forms are hollow within, concealing the speakers through which the voices of the dramatis personae pass, their density, pitch, and tenor molded and changed as they vibrate against those mycelial forms. The sculptures, you might say, metabolize Rinuccini’s libretto, which seems, via its connection to Ovid, to stand for the primary texts of Western civilization. The result is an opera, an elegy, an experiment, and a ceremonial recovery of the voice (or phono) as a material object.

Each of Mobarak’s characters speaks in a different language. Apollo uses Italian, but the play’s other figures variously intone Latin, Abkhaz, Chatino, Silbo Gomero, and !Xoon. Aside from Latin and Italian, these languages are known for having the largest number of phonemes of any languages on earth. According to the Endangered Languages Project, there are only about 2,600 speakers of !Xoon worldwide.

As one might imagine, the obsolescence of these languages has been accompanied by the global rise of English, which is, phonemically speaking, quite impoverished. Where English has forty-four phonemes, !Xoon, with its 164 consonants and forty-four vowels, has over 160 distinct sounds. By bringing these dominant and disappearing languages together in one space, Mobarak highlights the link between culture and colonization, and to the historical process by which one language can act as an invasive species, making it impossible for others to exist. When these languages sound together during performance, they exponentiate the power Peri attributed to his recitative: that of using dissonance, or musical disharmony, to capture an otherwise inaudible emotional timbre or tone.

Mobarak has long been invested in questions of transmission and erasure. The Lebanese American artist was born in Cairo. Her father, Jean Mobarak, speaks four languages, and he suffers from a neurological disease that allows him to remember only thirty seconds of the present at a time. The sound piece Father Fugue (2019), released as a full-length album by the LA-based label Recital, includes conversations between Mobarak and her father in Italian, Arabic, French, and English, along with snippets of improvised song, rhymes, and other sonic vignettes. Other work, such as 2020’s Sphere Studies, tests the limits of mycelium as a sculptural material that, like culture itself, transforms and sometimes destroys the environment in which it grows.

What linguists call the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that the structure of a language determines its speakers’ perceptions. Mobarak’s translation process has created an opera with the widest palette of human vocal sounds and—with its riot of whistles, clicks, consonants, and dipthongs—a collision of worlds. As her characters’ voices rise and fall, we are reminded of both the fragility and the fortitude of customs and civilizations. It is strange to be listening to Ovid in the twenty-first century in the middle of Manhattan, and it is strange to hear, all at once, several languages that you may never have heard before, whose words you might not understand, whose meaning may form an entirely different universe than the one you recognize.

Dafne Phono begins with the lone voice of Ovid, intoning the opera’s prologue in his native Latin. He speaks from a literal hole in the wall, with a vacuum suctioning air positioned behind it. This Ovid-void, which really does suck the air out of the room, is the voice of literary authority and of the Roman imperium. It is swiftly overtaken by Italian and Silbo Gomero, a whistling language used by inhabitants of La Gomera in the Canary Islands. Because Silbo Gomero emulates Spanish phonology, it represents both a history of colonial aggression (the Crown of Castile conquered the Canary Islands between 1402 and 1496) and, with its transmutation of Spanish words into musical notes, a creative response to its strictures—the construction of an alternative reality alongside an unlivable one. 

The first part of Mobarak’s libretto makes, to use Peri’s phrase, a new harmony out of disparate sonic and syntactical elements; the second part dismantles that harmony. Here, Mobarak has translated her Latin, Abkhaz, Chatino, Silbo Gomero, and !Xoon texts into modern English, meaning that the resulting script has now been translated twice, first from the Italian of 1598 into multiple languages and then back into a single language. The result is a suite of haunting motifs that exposes the coolly subversive power of translation.

“Per te,” Rinuccini’s Chorus tells Apollo, “vive e per te gode quanto scerne occhio mortale, o rettor del carro eterno”—Through you the mortal eye enlivens and enjoys all that it sees, o ruler of the eternal chariot. Apollo is the god not only of the sun but also of poetry and art, a civilizing force that supercharges everything with a new vitality and beauty. But already, once these lines are translated, their original meaning begins to disintegrate and a more ominous tonality surfaces. “Through you lives and enjoys the mortal eye all that it discerns,” goes the English, a syntactically perplexed statement whose obscurity casts a shadow on the sun god’s might. In Abkhaz, the phrase “the mortal eye” becomes “the death’s eye,” while the translation from Chatino gives us: “Through happy you came light earth everything discerns to seed rock face mortal.” 

When the Chorus gives its account of Daphne becoming a tree the Italian text, rendered into English, praises the “new marvels” of her transformation, admiring how her blond hair turns “into tree-like fronds” and how “the foot that just now ran fast and loose” is suddenly “buried in the ground, sprouting branches and leaves.” But, in English, the Chatino lines become almost nonsensical, as if to dramatize Daphne’s loss of the ability to speak for herself. With her “hanging hair blonde hair” changed “into leaves tree green,” and her “loose fast foot…buried inside soil sprouting thing branches and leaves,” Daphne is less a tree than a compound of nouns and adjectives. The !Xoon text, put (again) into English, finds her footprints “disappeared.”

On the page at least, the English is losing its grip over sense, while a new collective language—elliptical, skeptical, strange—takes its place. You could call that language “poetry,” but it is not Apollo’s kind. The décalage, or misfit, between each of Mobarak’s languages and between the original text of Dafne and its various translations leaves open a space where unexpected images, thoughts, ideas, and intuitions can emerge. Translation, of course, is also a metamorphosis, a change from one form into another. In Dafne Phono it becomes an operation on matter itself, a sacred procedure that, like the magic that saturates Ovid’s world, can shift life into death, love into cruelty, hymns of the powerful into the complaints of the weak.

In ancient Greece, theater actors wore masks called prosopon, which, in the most basic sense, means “face.” But the true reach of the word is much broader, for a prosopon is not merely a face but an extension and expression of the essence of a person. Etymologically, it seems to derive from the Greek pros, “to,” “toward,” or “at,” and ōpa, “face” or “eye.” A prosopon, then, is the means by which something is presented outward, to someone else. The Greeks considered a painter’s brush a prosopon, because she uses it to make concrete and visible to others what is interior to herself; a sculptor’s clay, or her mycelium, is a prosopon too. 

What Mobarak has done with Daphne Phono is restore Daphne’s voice to her through the prosopon of multiple voices, each speaking its own language. The restoration is at once partial and superabundant. Daphne’s metamorphosis can neither be undone nor her nymph’s body resurrected, just as the histories of violence of which it is both allegory and instance cannot be run backwards. But the silence that accompanies her transformation can be exploded, upset, made full by the beautiful noise of human plurality. It is this song we are invited to hear.