It was a far cry from ‘‘We don’t need no education’’ when Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters presented excerpts early this week from Ca Ira, his new three-act opera about the French Revolution.Rogers told an enthusiastic audience that the ambitious project first came to him in 1989, when French songwriter Etienne Roda-Gil brought him a libretto for the piece.Saying that the concerns of both the French and the American Revolutions, and their foundations in the then-new concept of human rights, had always resonated with him, Rogers recalled how quickly he agreed to write a score.‘‘It’s really about revolution in the broadest sense,’’ Waters said. ‘‘It’s about change, and personal change; we each have within us the potential for republic.‘‘The idea of republic is to discover within ourselves the freedom to choose a more humane way of empathising with each other,’’ he elaborated. ‘‘It’s a point I make again and again, but I feel it’s true for everybody.’’‘‘We stand at a crossroads,’’ Rogers said, speaking of the great extremes of wealth and poverty that remain as conspicuous in the modern world as they were in the days that ignited the 1789 Revolution. ‘‘And I refuse to fall into this cloud of cynicism and accept that there’s nothing we can do about it,’’ he said to applause.The rocker also conceded that he was ‘‘sort of reiterating The Wall’’, the seminal Pink Floyd work, and its themes of ‘‘powerlessness in the face of loss’’. And that empathy for human loss led him to draw a more sympathetic portrait of both Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette than has been the tradition.Waters said he was moved by Marie Antoinette’s lament for her children in a letter to her sister on the eve of her execution. That omnipresent humanity, whether of the masses or the royals, inspired one of Ca Ira’s arias The Last Night on Earth.Asked why he thought opera was off-putting and intimidating to many, Rogers said it could be because most people think it’s not meant for them, but only for the elite. But he noted the irony in that, given that opera was originally the art form of the masses. The same, he added, could be said of Shakespeare.He also held that he has ‘‘always loved the sound of big orchestras,’’ and indeed both The Wall and Dark Side of the Moon had their share of ambitious, conceptual and visionary segments, especially for works within the rock arena.Ca Ira will be released by Sony BMG Masterworks/Columbia Records on September 27.—Reuters
