Readers of this blog may
remember that the Paris Court of Appeals found in October 2015 that the
staging of the opera Le Dialogue des
Carmélites by Dmitry Chernyakov for the Munich Opera in 2010 violated the
moral rights of composer and librettist Francis Poulenc, which adapted the eponymous
theatrical play by Georges Bernanos.
Le
Dialogue des Carmélites tells the story of French
aristocrat Blanche de la Force who decides to enter the Carmelite Convent,
possibly to be sheltered from life, as she is fearful and shy. The French
Revolution upset her world and the Carmelites must leave the convent. Blanche
leaves the congregation to return to her family. When the Carmelites are
arrested and sentenced to death by the revolutionary tribunal, Blanche returns
to them as they are each climbing the steps to the guillotine, and she is the
last one to have her head cut off.
Dmitry Chernyakov had not modified the
score or the dialogue. However, his interpretation did not take place during
the French revolution, but in contemporary time. In the last scene, the
Carmelites are locked up in a shed full of explosives. Blanche appears on the
scene and pulls them all out to safety, one by one. She then comes back to the
shed which explodes, killing her, an apparent suicide.
The heirs of both Francis Poulenc and
Georges Bernanos had sued Dmitry Chernyakov and the Munich Opera, claiming a
violation of their moral rights, which are which are perpetual and transferable
upon death under Article
L. 121-1 of the French intellectual property code. The Paris Court of Appeals
had ruled in their favor, finding that the scenography profoundly modified the
final scene and distorted its spirit. The DVD of the play could no longer be
sold.
The director and the Opera took the case to
the Cour de cassation, France’s highest
civil court. The heirs argued in defense that “if a certain freedom can be recognized for the director to performance
his work, this freedom is limited by the moral right of the author to the respect
of the integrity and spirit of his work, which must not be denatured.”
But the Cour
de cassation just
‘broke’ this holding on June 22. The Court reasoned that the Paris Court of
appeals had noted that “the contested
staging did not modify the dialogue, absent in this part of the preexisting
work, nor the music, even going so far as to reproduce, along with the
religious songs, the sound of the guillotine which rhythms, in the Francis
Poulenc opera, each death, and that the
end of the story, as staged and described by Dmitry Chernyakov, respected the
themes of hope, of martyrdom, of grace and transfer of grace and of the
communion of saints dear to the authors of the original work, [and that therefore] the Court of appeals did not draw the legal consequences of its own
findings and violated [article L. 113-4 of
the French intellectual property code.]”
Article L.113-4 of the French intellectual property
code states that “[t]he composite work is the property of the
author who created it, subject to the rights of the author of the pre-existing
work.”
In our case, the staging of the opera is a
composite work, subject indeed to the rights of the authors of the pre-existing
work, the opera. Such rights include moral rights. But the staging, as a
composite work, is also a work on its own, protected by article L. 113-4. Since
it does not infringe on the rights of the authors of the original work, their
rights had not been violated.
This ruling is not surprising, as the Cour de cassation had held on May
15, 2015, that a Court of Appeals must explain “in a concrete manner how searching for the right balance between the
rights [of the author of the original
work and the rights of the author of the composite work] justified the sentence it had pronounced.”
The Cour
de cassation also cited Article 10, § 2, of the Convention for the
Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Protecting freedom of
expression, to find that the Court of appeals erred in forbidding the sale of
the DVDs of the opera and its broadcast, because it should have examined “what in the search for a fair balance
between the director's freedom of creation and the protection of the moral
rights of the composer and the author of the libretto justified the prohibition
order it ordered.”
The Versailles Court of Appeals will not
review the case again and will likely rule in favor of the director, and thus
preserve his freedom to create and to express himself. Moral rights are often viewed
in the U.S. as a way to censor creativity, and the 2015 Paris Court of appeals
ruling certainly provided grounds for this view.
No comments:
Post a Comment