The Nightmares of Childhood - in Song!
Horror Moments, Opera Edition
‘Horror Moments’ is a weekly series examining horror-inflected scenes and themes in unexpected places. The ‘moments’ are published weekly on Thursdays, and I share articles on the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more on Mondays. Catch up with the recent Kate Bush series here and the full back catalogue of horror moments (from Wallace & Gromit to Shakespeare) here. Don’t forget to subscribe!
Have a look around the room you’re in now and imagine that suddenly all the objects in it came to life and were absolutely furious with you. Which one are you most afraid of? I’ve got a toy chestburster from Alien so that’s me done for. This week in ‘horror moments, opera edition’ we explore a terrifying opera where a little boy is menaced by violent giant anthropomorphised objects. Welcome to L'enfant et les sortilèges (‘The Child and the Spells’) by Maurice Ravel.
If you know Ravel for one thing it’s probably ‘Bolero’ which Torvill and Dean brought to a wider audience with their famous winning ice skating routine. It’s worth pausing on Bolero for a moment before we get to the opera itself because there’s something about that piece of music that really sticks with you in a disturbing way — and I don’t mean the purple sleeves.
‘Bolero’ is a piece of music that sounds like someone losing their mind. It’s the same melody repeated and repeated and repeated, building and building getting louder and more abrasive, more orchestrally insane until it collapses under its own weight in a shudder. At its premiere a woman cried out that its creator was mad, and Ravel is said to have commented that she alone understood the piece. (If anyone wants to recreate this with me at my next play, I’ll give you a tenner.)
It’s no surprise that we find a lot of weirdness elsewhere in his work, Ravel delights in sounds that are intended to unsettle, to evoke the quality of nightmares.
A Sadistic Boy
L'enfant et les sortilèges premiered in 1926. It’s the story of a boy (played by a soprano) who is, if you’ll pardon my French, a ‘une petite merde.’ He has been sent to his room for bad behaviour and starts trashing everything he sees. He’s got a history of arbitrary violence, including to animals, and is basically the sort of kid who likes to destroy things just to see how it feels.
But tonight is the night when his sins will come back to haunt him. As he drifts into sleep he finds himself caught in a nightmare where the very objects and animals he has abused assume gigantic proportions and come to life.
Each has their own specific grievance. ‘We’ll soon be rid of this child with wicked heels,’ says one of the armchairs to the other. There’s a Wedgewood teapot and a broken china cup who bully him around the room. A princess from his picture book chastises him — even the fireplace is displeased ‘impudent little savage, you’ve insulted all the friendly gods.’
I’m a huge fan of the clock who laments the way his balance has been thrown off because of the boy’s antics. It’s like an operatic vision of ‘Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared’ (which I did a mini-series on recently).
At the end of the first half, the boy’s maths homework comes to life in the form of a little old man with a chorus of maddening numbers who torment him with questions. It’s like a vision of the Devil and his fiends: a child’s idea of hell.
“Mon Dieu, c'est l'arithmétique!”
In the second half of the opera, the boy is pursued outside. He is beginning to repent and gain a sense of empathy, but the creatures of the garden remember his cruelties and refuse to befriend him. He feels lost and frightened in the dark and starts calling for his mother. Oh and a couple of horny cats turn up which is the last thing anyone needs:
Finally, the boy wins the animals over by showing kindness to a wounded squirrel and helping to bandage its tail. They all carry the exhausted child gently back to the house where he wakes. Just like in Bolero, Ravel leaves it till the final bar to give us the emotional climax. The boy calls out simply ‘Maman!’ and the opera ends. She, we hope will soon arrive to comfort him.
Children Left Alone
Ravel described L'enfant et les sortilèges as a ‘phantasmagoria,’ a reference to that proto-cinematic form of theatre where frightening images and scenes were projected in dark rooms to thrill an audience. The libretto was written by the mononymous ‘Colette’ who didn’t typically write for music but was desperate to work with Ravel. She wrote the text in eight days to intrigue him and it worked; they together created an opera unlike anything that had come before.
It is a phantasmagoria indeed, and one that borrows the surrealist’s trick for making mundane objects do things that they really shouldn’t. It is also, at its heart, a stern cautionary fairy tale where a child learns obedience through terror.
Horror films have often scrutinised the fears of childhood, and there were a couple that sprang to mind when I watched L'enfant et les sortilèges. The first was Norwegian-language film The Innocents (2021) which shares with the 1961 classic of the same name only the thematic connection that they are both about children who might or might not be evil. In the recent film, director Eskil Vogt explores, as reviewer Jessica Kiang put it ‘the process by which young children acquire morality.’ Like L’enfant, this means facing the uncomfortable truth that children can be disturbingly sadistic, and that small grudges, insecurities, and fears can lead to big problems when children are left to their own devices.
There is, for example, (mild spoiler) a character who resents the attention her big sister with non-verbal autism gets from their parents so puts broken glass in her shoes, knowing that she can’t express what is happening and their mum won’t find out until the end of the day when her feet are lifted out in blood-soaked socks. The film is challengingly sympathetic to its cruel children, daring us to grow to like and understand them, to want to pardon them for crimes they still don’t fully understand. Here too we see a lonely little boy who has done something awful breaking down in guilt and confusion as he cries out for his mother.
L’enfant also reminds me of the 2022 experimental horror Skinamarink, a real marmite of a film if ever there was one. Some found its atmosphere uniquely chilling, others felt its lack of plot or action made it tediously dull. It’s about two children who wake up to find themselves alone in their house with ordinary objects behaving strangely and doors and windows disappearing so they can’t get out. The absence of their father is a central frightening truth, just as Ravel’s boy is left to the mercy of the objects and creatures once his mother leaves the room. Director Kyle Edward Ball filmed the proof of concept for Skinamarink in his own childhood home.
Perhaps if you like the premise of Skinamarink but don’t connect with its style, try L'enfant et les sortilèges. Same child imperilment, more singing.
The thought of children left on their own in a threatening landscape is doubly upsetting for adults. We can see from our mature perspective the vulnerability of so small a person in so big a world, but we can also remember what it was like when nothing the grown-ups did made sense and you felt so angry you could tear the world apart. Some of the smartest depictions of the horrors of childhood have been honest about the contradicting truths of children themselves, those sadistic innocents.
And there will be more operatic ‘innocents’ next week. Until then, happy nightmares everyone!
Horror moments are posted every Thursday and a wide variety of articles exploring the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more are published on Mondays.
Remember that you can pay to subscribe for extra benefits or buy me a coffee here to keep me writing. You can also like, share, comment, and recommend to help the substack grow. Thank you!
So the kid is Sid from Toy Story?
This is awesome. I've off to watch a recording of "L'enfant et les sortilèges" with my best headphones. Gotta love child imperilment - especially when accompanied by singing.