Fouché (Working title)
Fouché
Franz Hummel, composer
Copyright: privat
Libretto: Sandra Hummel
Fouché was Napoleon’s chief of police, monk and instructor priests, Jacobin, master of intrigue, intellectual mass murderer, and the inventor of total state surveillance. Having amassed great wealth and nearing the end of his days, Fouché—with the half-hearted approval of Metternich—flees into exile in Linz. Sensitive and subtle, highly educated, totally amoral, the Fouché that arrives in Upper Austria is a pitiable creature. Day in and day out, he ambles about the penitentiary-like central courtyard of his villa, constantly casting his searching, anxiety-ridden gaze towards a lone figure standing atop a distant hill. Is it Bonaparte? Is the man pursuing him? Keeping him under surveillance?
Fearful visions alternate with hybrid attacks and reveal the utterly dire straits in which he now finds himself, the man who had been obsessed with power but had always played second fiddle, the man whose cunningly weaved web of espionage and betrayal had finally come to be regarded as treacherous by the man of action himself: Napoleon.
Robespierre, Marat, Danton, Louis XVIII, Lafayette, Napoleon, Josephine Bonaparte: Each of these figures from his past steps forth from the anonymity of the chorus to torment Fouché’s memory. His name synonymous with corruption and abuse of power, Fouché remains, as a faithful pater familias, the prototype of the loveless and unloved individual driven by the compulsion to know everything about everyone. He ends up a human wreck.
Joseph Fouché presents the personality of this public figure in order to deliver a dramatic psychogram of the obsession with power, a Hieronymus Bosch-type parable about a phenomenon that, albeit with much less boldness and wit, still haunts the corridors of democracy.
