The Life of a Composer

Frederic Chopin’s turbulent relationship with the nineteenth century fiction writer George Sand is told through Chopin’s music and Sand’s writing.Featuring Dr Christian Heim on piano and Dr Caroline Heim playing the notorious “George” Sand. Meticulously researched and based on their letters and journals, the production is part concert, part play. Set against a Parisian background of Napoleonic Wars and the Industrial Revolution, this production reveals the true heart of Chopin and Sand’s all-consuming attraction.This research project aims to explore the concept of “double-consciousness” (Diderot, 11) in a music/theatre piece. This was explored in the writing of the piece, the performance of the piece and the audience reception to the performance. The piece was written combining the concept of music time and theatre time with the aspiration of creating a suspension of disbelief (Heim, 26) for the actors and audience members alike. The Life of a Composer was directed with a split between the “music time” and “speaking time” allowing for a sense of doubling of consciousness to pervade the atmosphere in which according to Böhme “determine[s] the atmosphere radiated by things. They are, therefore, the way things are felt present in space” (32, 33). The actor, during the performance onstage would then be able to have a sense of herself as actor during the music performance and character during the spoken lines. This was achieved in the Brisbane City Hall performance. The audience reception to the piece confirmed the realisation of a double consciousness performance as they described “being transported to another world” in the music while being brought back to earth when the “savvy George Sand” spoke. Future explorations would be to undertake interviews and a questionnaire with the audience members to note the times when they felt their concentration focussed on actor/character or both. Gernot Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, ed. Jean-Paul Thibaud (London and New York: Routledge, 2017).Denis Diderot, The Paradox of Acting: Masks and Faces (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957).Caroline Heim, Actors and Audiences: Conversations in the Electric Air (London: Routledge, 2020