Q: That 1987 show in Los Angeles led to the first CD, titled Cirque du Soleil. There were many others after that. Was your entrance into the Cirque a turning point for you as a composer?

René Dupéré: Yes, it was a turning point in my career: my first full-time job as a composer!

Q: But between street musician and composer for Cirque du Soleil, there’s a world of difference!

René Dupéré: Well, no, really, there wasn’t a world of difference. In my work with the Cirque, I began with the instruments I knew and I became a composer for a type of show similar to what we did in the street. At the start, it wasn’t about the big machine that we know today. The evolution happened progressively between the beginnings of 1984 and the first big Los Angeles show in 1987. We simply continued to work as a team.

Q: Did you feel, at the start, a sort of constraint with the circus numbers? In the first album, the pieces seem to be more linked to the numbers.

René Dupéré: Yes, the 1987 CD is a bit closer to the show. For the subsequent discs, following a proposition I made, we decided that each disc would have its own life, independently of the show from which it emerged. It would be inspired by the show, but wouldn’t be a summary - otherwise, we would have added the caption “live!” That’s why the other CDs are different on that level.

Q: So your music has to be autonomous. At the same time, you have to take into account the circus numbers for which it is composed. Or must the numbers adapt to the music that you’ve prepared? As a composer, how do you make the connection between all these elements?

René Dupéré: By trying to avoid describing the action, which leads necessarily to redundancy, or underlining things too precisely. That leads me to what appears to me to be a distinguishing trait of my music: It evokes, and can therefore be used in diverse contexts. For example, when I compose a music for a trapeze number, I don’t compose a piece for an artist who is making dangerous movements and is in danger of falling at any moment. I could then be happy with drum rolls. That’s what traditional circus music does; it tries to underline in big ways, and in a redundant way, that what’s going on there is dangerous. My role, as a circus musician, is to evoke things. I don’t have to evoke the gestures of the artist, we see them. What else might this number suggest to me? Maybe the flight of a bird, for example. The same trapeze number presented to you five times accompanied by five different pieces of music could make you experience very different emotions each time. Godard said that behind each movement hides an ideology, an intention. Thus, before a circus number, I can be influenced by the number itself, by the person, her way of moving, of carrying herself on the trapeze, by the trapeze itself... The same trapeze number presented by two different people might lead me to compose two different pieces of music.

Q: Equally important, this musical piece inspired by the trapeze number can be listened to with or without the trapeze number.

René Dupéré: Completely. That’s why I really highlight the evocation of things as well as the melodies. I need there to be melodies. I am not interested in doing little bouts of music that change each time something new happens. On the contrary, music creates a unity in a series of figures which, at first glance, might not be connected. Basically, a trapeze number, to take up that example again, is a series of figures, between which there can be dead moments. The trapezist, after his third figure, will maybe take around fifteen seconds to catch his breath while balancing himself. The music must fill this period without seeming to do so. Basically, if the trapezist seems to be resting up there, people will start to look at their watch and yawn! The music should therefore fill these empty spaces without letting them show. The line is completely the inverse of that of traditional circus music. My music doesn’t try to show things, but it seeks rather to create a sort of chemistry or unity.

Q: Let’s try to see what that means in concrete terms, beginning with three examples: Saltimbanco, Mystère and Alegría. How can you illustrate what you just described to me by describing the spirit in which you composed the music for each of these shows? How could you define the difference between each of these albums?

René Dupéré: An easy question! The three shows had quite different origins. When we prepare a show, we always begin with very general ideas. In the case of Saltimbanco, the original idea was that of urbanity: the city, the people who populate the city, the signs, the meeting places, the intersections, the parallelisms, the multiplicity of cultures. When someone asks me what Saltimbanco means to me, I reply, “It’s like crossing New York in a taxi, the windows down, and listening to all the different music that rises from the city.” That’s what Saltimbanco is to me.

Q: Have you had this experience?

René Dupéré: Only in my head!

Q: Saltimbanco: urbanity, different sounds... What does that suggest as music? How would you describe this music to a person who has never heard it?

René Dupéré: That’s a difficult question! Saltimbanco is in fact my first real attempt at a musical crossbreed, which I later took up again with Mystère and Alegría. It’s the most eclectic show, which touches very different universes. That’s really the color that I wanted to give this music, in the image of the set, composed of ovals of all sorts of colors. A cosmopolitan music, evocative, whose influences are numerous and hard to identify.

Mystère, for me, is mythology, music of Balkan and Greek influence. There is much more unity in that disc. In the show, we don’t see Ulysses, nor the other gods, but we are left with the very large idea of mythology. In my compositions, I therefore put the accent on Greek music and percussion...

Q: And Alegría?

René Dupéré: With that show, I had the feeling of coming full circle. I came back to the origins of Cirque du Soleil, with the accordion, the violin. As much as Saltimbanco shows traits that are more American or African, at times, one can find in Alegría a sort of European flavor which was present in the first show of 1987. I wished to return to the street performers, to the Fellini-esque side of our origins.

Q: Was it a return to Fanfafonie?

René Dupéré: Yes, and that’s the impression I had while composing the music of Alegría. It’s also a return to some musicians that I am particularly fond of: Rota, Morricone, Vivaldi, Mancini... the Italians!

Q: Your romantic side?

René Dupéré: Sentimental.

Q: You mentioned Ennio Morricone. You already alluded to the fact that his music exists independently of the films for which he composes.

René Dupéré: Yes, and the producers have difficulty accepting that. They have the impression that this limits their production, while that’s not the case at all.

You know, Morricone is maybe the only composer in Hollywood who writes his music with a sheet of paper and a pencil... He doesn’t play synthesizers, he writes, at his worktable, like the composers of the olden days.

Q: And you, do you write in this way?

René Dupéré: No. I also work with scores - I have to see my music - but on my computer. The computer transforms whatever I play on the synthesizer into a score. So I can see immediately what I just played, then correct certain elements, add counter-melodies, etc., beginning with what I see on the screen.

Q: Let’s come back to Alegría. Why was the title piece of this CD so successful? It’s really the musical piece that comes to people’s minds when they’re talking about Cirque du Soleil.

René Dupéré: All successes are due to a combination of factors, never one element by itself. In the case of Alegría, I think that the word alegría itself has something to do with it. The word is Spanish and the lyrics are in Spanish, Italian and English... People who don’t know those languages don’t understand much of it! But alegría is a magical word, a bit like abracadabra, and it occurs right at the beginning of the piece. It’s accentuated by a catchy melody and a very particular voice. All of those factors made the piece a great hit.

I went to Los Angeles last week and I stayed with one of the dancers who was from the first tour of West Side Story. We were just talking about this type of phenomenon. West Side Story is also a combination of diverse elements: the music of Leonard Bernstein, the choreography of Jerome Robbins, the acting of George Chakiris and Natalie Wood.

Q: You mentioned the importance of the voice. There is the voice and there are the words. In some of your pieces you write the words in French, in another language or even in an invented language. What makes it so a musical piece must receive words in Spanish rather than in French, or in English rather than Italian, etc.?

René Dupéré: When I work with Élise, who is the voice in the album Voyage, we always let the music decide. Whether it’s in French, in English, in Spanish or in Italian, whatever, it’s really the music that decides. That’s what we did with the pieces on Voyage. With certain sounds, which recall the Balkans, we decided to use invented languages, because Élise could sing and invent phonèmes, which give the impression of a real language. But it’s the music that decides.

I will always remember an interview with Michel Tournier who spoke of one of his novels, The Meteors, I believe. Two thirds of the way into the book, the main character dies. Critics were pointing out to him that after the disappearance of his main character, the novel’s appeal diminished, as the action was taken over by the secondary characters. Tournier said, “It’s not my fault, it’s not my decision. The main character died, he decided that he had to die there. I can’t do anything about it. Sure, I could have made him die at the end and made more money with my book, but it happened like that. He died there and I couldn’t do anything about it.”