Royal Opera
House
Agnès – Barbara Hannigan
Protector – Christopher
Purves
First Angel/Boy – Bejun Mehta
Second Angel/Marie – Victoria
Simmonds
Third Angel/John – Allan
Clayton
Katie Mitchell (director)
Vicki Mortimer (designs)
Jon Clark (lighting)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
George Benjamin (conductor)
Near-unanimous approval tends
to make me suspicious. However I might have tried, though – and, to be honest,
I did not try very hard – I found myself unable to dissent. If George Benjamin’s
new opera, Written on Skin, does not
necessarily knock one for six, sixty even, in the way that a Birtwistle opera
would, such is not Benjamin’s subtler – not superior, just different – way. The Mask of Orpheus and Gawain, for instance, make a cataclysmic impression akin to one’s
first Wagner; in a sense, Benjamin requires closer, more attentive listening,
not unlike that necessitated by Pelléas
et Mélisande, and, just as important, readiness to consider what opera
might be, what it might do, where it might yet take us. (Not, I hasten to add,
that Birtwistle does not benefit greatly from the most attentive listening, but
one might entirely miss the point of Benjamin without it.) Insofar as one can
possibly feel emboldened to use the word after a single hearing, Written on Skin is a masterpiece. Perhaps
most intriguingly, it seems to mark more of a beginning, Benjamin’s chamber
opera Into the Little Hill
notwithstanding, than a culmination. It may be the latter too, in that in
retrospect, much of Benjamin’s œuvre seems to have been heading in this
direction, but the opportunities opened up seem greater still.
Martin Crimp’s libretto
derives inspiration from a thirteenth-century Occitan ballad, though no more
than Benjamin’s music does it attempt any manner of pastiche. The story, at
least on one level, is dealt with easily. A landowner, The Protector invites
The Boy into his house and household to write an illustrated book, to be
written on skin, a book that would chronicle and celebrate a good life and good
deeds. Initially suspicious, the Protector’s Wife – his ‘property’, as he tells
us – falls both for book and Boy, their combination a liberation for her, in a
sense an instantiation of personhood. They become lovers, as documented by the
Boy in his book. Though attracted to the Boy himself, the Protector kills him
and serves Agnès a meal that includes the Boy’s heart. What is intended as
revenge, as a way to subordinate her once again, provokes defiance, for Agnès
is able to declare that the taste of the Boy’s heart will never leave her
mouth. She frustrates her husband’s attempt to kill her by taking her own life.
So far so good, but in many
ways, what most interests are the framing and the questioning. An opening
Chorus of Angels takes the audience back eight centuries and bring to life the
Protector and Agnès; one of them takes on the role of the Boy. The angels
intervene and comment, drawing a parallel with Biblical Creation: man is
invented and punished; woman is invented and blamed. Who provokes the dreams of
the Protector, in which he learns of a secret page to the book, Agnès depicted
therein ‘gripping the Boy in a secret bed’? There are many other such questions
one might and should ask, but they are perhaps to be subsumed within the
striking realisation that writing itself is at the heart of the drama. Fate in
the guise of the pitiless angels is strong, but narrative formulations in which
the protagonists speak of themselves in the third person present not only a
degree of artificiality – ‘naïve’ art, in Schiller’s celebrated formulation,
being no longer possible – but compel the audience to write and to interrogate
its own dramas. We are involved in something old, strange, and yet new; at the
same time, we are both of the Angels’ party and repelled by it. Benjamin’s
music, is of course instrumental – in more than one sense – in accomplishing
that too, if never straightforwardly. The fifteen scenes may in some sense be considered
‘cinematic’ but they are still more of the theatre.
But before coming to that,
let us consider Katie Mitchell’s staging. The thing with ‘one size fits all’
metatheatricality is that, not unlike a stopped clock, from time to time it
fits. And given the horror of her ENO Idomeneo, it is a matter of
gratitude that Mitchell did not on this occasion try something different. I
cannot in all honesty say that I perceived a particular need for the extras to
be doing what they were doing rather than something else, at least for much of
the time, but that, I think, was the point. A sense of something ongoing,
indifferent to mere human concerns, angels as bureaucrats, one might say, came
across so strongly for the very reason that Mitchell had paid such attention to
apparently irrelevant – though who is to say? – detail. Action proceeding on
different levels, physical as well as otherwise, here assists the story or
stories, Vicki Mortimer’s contrasting ‘old’ and ‘new’ designs assisting equally
in that respect.
I shall limit my remarks
concerning Benjamin’s music, remarks which must necessarily remain generalised;
I have only heard it once and have not seen the score. Nevetherless, even from
a single hearing, it not only accomplished a necessary union of intellectual
and emotional involvement; it enticed one to hear the work again and again.
Sonorities old and new beguile, though it is worth reiterating that there is
nothing of the pastiche even, indeed especially, to the use of an ‘old’
instrument such as the bass viol. Its Passion resonances may be unavoidable,
but what most strikes is its apparent contemporaneity, to the action, to us, to
wherever or whenever we might be. Likewise the use towards the end of glass
harmonica might initially have one think ‘Mozart’, but what it does has
apparently little to do with those strange miniature masterpieces Mozart
composed under very particular circumstances. The ethereal quality remains, to
be sure, but almost takes on an electronic- or, perhaps better, post-electronic
quality, seducing our ears, expanding their range, hinting even at sounds we
have yet to perceive. Stockhausen may seem quite distant, and in most senses he
is, yet perhaps his ghost in that sense haunts.
Perhaps more striking still,
however, are the use not of ‘unusual’ sounds, but of the orchestra as commonly
understood and indeed of post-tonal – use what adjective one will – harmonic relations.
One hears references, conscious or otherwise, above all to Pelléas and to Wozzeck –
I was delighted to see Benjamin mention both works in a programme interview,
having reached that conclusion for myself – but it is only occasionally, for
instance in a Wozzeck-like set of
intervals, that one can say for certain, and even when one can, it is admirably
unclear what that might mean, if anything. The understatedness must surely have
some inspiration in Pelléas, the only
non-Benjamin opera the composer has conducted, making one listen, drawing one
in, preparing the way for the moments of cataclysm, which register with power
all the greater. The pacing and drawing of climax suggests, no embodies, a
mastery of musico-dramatic composition to rank with some of the greatest. Vocal
writing is grateful, yet again makes no deluded references to styles no longer
possible.
About an hour and a half,
moreover, proves once again a wise length for an opera. There are great operas
that last for much longer, of course, operas from which one would rather slit
one’s throat rather than have a single bar cut from them. However, one thinks
more often of brevity in terms of its lack than its excess. (I vigorously, even
furiously, dissent, but I have even heard people talk of longueurs in Elektra.) Janáček tends to have it just
about right; so does Berg in Wozzeck.
Wagner never fails in that respect – well, perhaps in Rienzi, though we should do well to grant ‘Meyerbeer’s greatest
opera’ the opportunity to be heard ‘in full’, whatever that might be. Yet, as
everyone knows, Wagner offers the most dangerous of models. Mozart and
Monteverdi are similarly unapproachable, perhaps still more so. It is far
better, then, to have an informed audience wondering whether there might have
been room for a little more expansiveness than to have it constantly checking
its watches.
Performances were excellent.
I assume Christopher Purves to have been a little under the weather, since so
fine a singer would not normally have had recurring problems at the top of his
range. Dramatic truth shone through nevertheless; it was at the time of hearing
– and I do not mean this in a restrictive fashion – impossible to imagine
anyone else in his role of Protector. Bejun Mehta and Barbara Hannigan both
proved sensational as the Boy and Agnès. By now, at this stage on the
production’s tour, this must almost be a repertoire work for them, but their
combination of musical and dramatic intelligence felt as keen as I imagine it
might have done at the premiere. Ethereal beauty, sensuous allure, and an
inscrutable blend of apparent naïveté and knowingness marked Mehta’s Boy.
Hannigan’s musico-dramatic excellence, her journey from subservience through
sexual liberation to mastery – a deliberately gendered choice of word – over her
husband were charted equally by stage presence, vocal line, and communication
of the text. Victoria Simmonds and Allan Clayton offered admirable support as
angels and as Agnès’s sister and brother-in-law.
Last yet anything but least,
the performance of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House was breathtaking, not
least in the sense that one had to remind oneself after the event that this was
‘new music’. Benjamin’s score was performed with both special, loving
attention, every phrase sounding apparently as it should – again, I should
stress, there is a degree of supposition here, without actually seeing it for
myself – and the whole despatched as if, in the best sense, this were staple
operatic fare. By that, I mean not to say that there was the slightest hint of
routine, but rather that the confidence to express and indeed to seduce was
paramount. If such playing did not convince, convert, then it is difficult to
know what would.
It really is past time, then,
to smash the museum, a museum all the more constraining – as any good
Feuerbachian will tell you – because its alienation is imaginary. Opera houses –
all of them, certainly not just Covent Garden – devote an inordinate amount of
time to works of little consequence, endlessly repeated, for no other apparent reason
than that historically they have formed part of the repertoire. What, then,
sells out? Written on Skin and The
Minotaur. Whenever one speaks to opera-goers – as opposed, doubtless,
to people who attend ‘the opera’ as a social occasion – they thirst for new
repertoire and for modernist classics, many of them unstaged in whichever
house, city, even country one is considering. Would anyone really care if
another note of Donizetti were never heard again? Many of us would be relieved.
In any case, surely it is about time that Nono, Henze, Stockhausen, Busoni, Dallapiccola,
Schoenberg, even Haydn and Gluck, had a chance, still more so composers who –
cue a deep intake of breath – have the temerity still to be alive. What people
talk about, care about, are willing even to travel across the globe for, are
great reimaginings of repertoire masterworks – Parsifal from Gatti and Herheim, for instance –
revivals of unjustly neglected masterworks – take the Theater an der Wien’s recent Mathis der Maler
– and great contemporary musical drama. Opportunities to hear the nth high C
may be relegated to the circus. Boulez, from whom we still of course await an
opera, once spoke of his admiration for the Red Guard, since it was willing to
destroy; if audiences are to renew themselves, it will be through works such as
those of Benjamin, Birtwistle, et al.,
works which themselves renew the operatic form to which so many of us are
devoted.
Still, Kasper Holten’s new
regime seems to be offering something of a new dawn for the Royal Opera; the recently
announced 2013-14 season an undoubted improvement upon what has gone
before. Contrasts with the artistic near-nullity on offer next year in Paris
and Vienna is stark. Let us hope, then, that this splendid achievement will be
built upon and that never again shall we hear that a new production of a wonderful
opera such as Weber’s Oberon – hardly
an avant-gardist work! – has been cancelled in order to make room for the third
run within a single season of La traviata. If one’s reaction to a
great opera performance, whether it be a newly-minted Figaro under Sir Colin Davis or a genuinely new work, is to wish to
hear it again immediately, then that is what we need to feel about opera
seasons as a whole. Let us toast, then, the Royal Opera’s plans to place new
opera at the very heart of what it does, of what it is, of what it will be.
