© Benjamin Bernheim / Paris 2024 Olympic Games
As part of the closing ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Franco-Swiss tenor Benjamin Bernheim performed a modernised version of L'Hymne à Apollon. This ancient Greek song was discovered in Delphi in 1893 and is one of the few surviving examples of ancient Greek music.
For the last two weeks, Paris has been living to the rhythm of the 2024 Olympic Games. This sporting and festive chapter came to an end last night at the end of a Closing Ceremony that included several musical highlights. Among the highlights of the evening were Zaho de Sagazan singing Sous le ciel de Paris at sunset in the Tuileries Gardens, Belgian singer Angèle, accompanied by the group Phoenix and DJ Kavinsky, lighting up the Stade de France with Nightcall, and Yseult's stunning rendition of Frank Sinatra's My Way in front of more than 70,000 spectators on site - and an average television audience of 17.1 million.
Like the Opening Ceremony, the Closing Ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris also featured classical music. Dressed in a black jacket and white tennis shoes, Zahia Ziouani and the 70 musicians of her Divertimento ensemble played a re-arranged version of the French national anthem. Under the conductor's baton, the Marseillaise (sometimes considered warlike) took on a surprisingly gentle tone, first barely whispered by a solo flute, then gradually joined by the entire orchestra and choir.
From the ancient to the modern Olympic Games
Lyrical song was also represented at the closing ceremony by Benjamin Bernheim. The Franco-Swiss tenor sang the Hymn to Apollo, a little-known ancient song, accompanied on the piano by Alain Roche, who played his instrument "weightlessly", suspended above the stage in a costume made of VHS tapes.
As we know, the ceremony devised by director Thomas Jolly featured the journey of a science fiction “Golden Voyageur“, a character from the distant future who rediscovers the remains of the Olympic Games in order to recreate them. L'Hymne à Apollon is doubly relevant in this context: the work is an ancient Greek song dating from the time of the first ancient Olympic Games, and after being rediscovered in Delphi in 1893 by archaeologists from the École française d'Athènes, it was performed the following year in Paris in a new harmonisation by Gabriel Fauré during the congress that consecrated the creation of the modern Olympic Games.
This double symbolism justifies its revival last night, this time in a new version modernised by Victor Le Masne, the ceremony's musical director, to suit the tone of the evening, while respecting Benjamin Bernheim's operatic vocal identity.
The Hymn to Apollo, or the rediscovery of the music of the ancient Greeks
We have thus (re)discovered an astonishing, languorous, almost plaintive work, representative of the music of the ancient Greeks. While the architecture, sculpture and literature of antiquity have survived, the music of the Greeks has all but disappeared. We had to wait until 1893 to find the text and, above all, the 80 bars of this Hymn to Apollo, engraved on the marble slabs of the Athenian treasury dedicated to Apollo at Delphi. At the end of the 19th century, the text was transcribed by the Hellenists Théophile Homolle and Henri Weil (revealing an ode to the divinity of the arts and the muses), while Théodore Reinach deciphered the musical part. Gabriel Fauré then worked on a new harmonisation of the work, which was recorded in particular by the French tenor Cyrille Dubois.
Victor Le Masne's modernised version of the Hymne à Apollon is aimed at a more contemporary audience. The work has been shortened, with more breathing space and more room for Alain Roche's piano, to make it more contemporary and in keeping with the tonality of the evening. Nevertheless, it remains a testament to early music.
Benjamin Bernheim has brought it back to life for one evening, in prime time, between two rehearsals for Les Contes d'Hoffmann at the Salzburg Festival. The tenor plays the title role in Mariame Clément's new production, which turns the poet Hoffmann into a film director in love with his actresses. The premiere is scheduled for tomorrow, 13 August, at the Grosses Festspielhaus in Salzburg.
free translation of our article first published in French
the 12 of August, 2024 | Print
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