BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales Conductor: Stephen Layton Soprano: Elizabeth Watts Tenor: Allan Clayton Bass-baritone: Matthew Brook
In recent years, many commentators have bemoaned the ‘museum culture’
of classical music programming (myself included, and notwithstanding
the important work and contemporary relevance of many actual museums).
But, putting aside the perpetual re-canonisation of familiar repertoire
that this entails, I for one am at the same time grateful that Haydn’s
own, spectacular natural history museum, so to speak – The Creation
– remains a concert staple. Here in Cardiff, that great oratorio formed
the joyous conclusion of an imaginative, short series of concerts by
the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales celebrating a creation
theme; a series which featured lesser-known 20th century works performed by the orchestra, as well as the world premiere of Mark Bowden’s secular oratorio A Violence of Gifts.
There is no ‘right and wrong’ way to perform The Creation –
if, indeed, there is any piece. In terms of scale, Haydn himself oversaw
performances of chamber and vast proportion alike, depending on the
venue and performers to hand. These days of course, we have
opportunities to hear the work performed by period bands or modern
orchestras of wildly contrasting stylistic bent. Moreover, it was the
first ever bilingual large-scale score, with twin librettos in English
or German to choose from; both were adapted for Haydn by the Viennese
court librarian, concert patron and Enlightenment figure, Gottfried van
Swieten, from an original of unknown authorship, now lost.
At St David’s Hall, we heard The Creation rather than Die Schöpfung.
The well-balanced forces of a reduced BBC NOW orchestra and full chorus
fanning the stage behind were joined by an exemplary trio of soloists
(plus alto Olivia Gomez for the final ‘Amen’) under the expert,
energetic baton of Stephen Layton. I was hardly the only person present
in need of solace after what, for many, had been a dreadful electoral
twenty-four hours. In the event, the performance proved radiant with
Haydn’s life-affirming spirit and vigour. Echoes of a glorious English
choral tradition abounded, reaching back to Haydn’s inspiration in
Handel’s The Messiah and other dramatic oratorios of the
English baroque ‘sublime’. But there were also surprising and delightful
pre-hints of – dare I suggest – English romantic song in certain arias;
notably, for example, that of bass-baritone Matthew Brook’s pastoral
Raphael of the Third Day.
Devotion, vitality and humour were present in equal measure. Tracking the biblical account of Genesis, with added text from the Psalms and Milton’s Paradise Lost,
Haydn’s pictorial innovations and orchestral contrasts were performed
with infectious enthusiasm by Layton and his team. The famous, radical
overture, ‘The Representation of Chaos’, smouldered and then blazed with
light – if anything, only to be eclipsed on this occasion by a rapt
sunrise at the Fourth Day. Orchestral ensemble was a little ragged at
first, particularly on downbeats and in more elastic tempi, but, with
encouragement from their tireless Leader, Lesley Hatfield, the players
soon settled to produce a performance of character and distinction.
Things really burst into life at the entry of Allan Clayton as the
archangel Uriel upon the First Day. His lyric tenor rang beautifully
throughout, matched in richness of tone and delivery by soprano
Elizabeth Watts, who revealed a lovely top C and some exquisite
ornamentation in her Fifth Day aria as Gabriel; a highlight of the
evening, with delicate accompaniment from the woodwind. Brook was a
wonderfully clear and incisive Adam, as he was Raphael – perhaps
stronger in the upper register than the lower, but never lacking in
musical panache. Indeed, Brook’s opera buffa rendition of the
various animals from ‘heavy beasts’ to ‘bleating sheep’ and the ‘sinuous
worm’ – aided by fruity brass and lithe strings with but two, excellent
double basses – was sheer comic pleasure.
One of the challenges for the soloists in The Creation is to
be able to blend with each other and dovetail with the chorus as
strongly as they shine in their individual parts. Here, the various
textures and ensembles were gracefully navigated, with long-range,
naturally breathing phrases matching vocal with instrumental lines.
Layton moved fluidly from fortissimo tutti to the intimacy of secco recitative,
creating a sense of grandeur whilst allowing individual flourish
(including that of the spirited continuo team: fortepianist Andrew
Wilson-Dickson and Guest Principal Cellist, Alice Neary).
The chorus sang magnificently, always ready to embrace the many
swerves of key and tempo, with fugal passages full of rhythmic flair.
Delivery was clear and precise without over-emphasis, exuding a joy in
communal music-making that was as touching as it was elemental – and
with audible words to boot from where I was seated.
Haydn had brought the original libretto back to Vienna with him after
two extended visits to London between 1791 and 1795. The audience at The Creation
premiere in 1798 (at the Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna) were agog to
see whether this new work would display the same dazzling orchestral
writing and harmonic excitement of the ‘London’ symphonies that their
beloved composer had written during this period. They were not
disappointed. The success of the premiere was quickly followed by the
same in Paris, Berlin and London itself, sealing Haydn’s reputation as a
genius across the continent.
The work remains a wonderful achievement; as striking in its
simplicity as in its radical effects (which would come to be frowned
upon in the 19th century as too ‘worldly’ and ‘material’), and in daring
to depict as enormous and hallowed a subject as God’s creation. Coming
hard on the heels of a new, Enlightenment age of religious questioning
and scepticism, surely only the most humble, optimistic of men could
have hoped to succeed so universally at the task – and it is interesting
how Haydn depicts Adam and Eve as a tender, blissful couple (so
contrary to his own marriage!), with only Uriel’s late warning of ‘false
conceits’ hinting at the Fall to come.
Haydn’s optimism, colour and inventive wit continue to gladden the
heart today. A person of self-described cheerful disposition, he once
commented ‘I was never so devout as when I was at work on The Creation.
I fell on my knees each day and begged God to give me the strength to
finish the work.’ This gloriously uplifting performance, with Layton’s
fresh, dynamic interpretation, seemed especially heaven-sent.
Image from William Blake’s ‘God as an Architect’, an Illustration from The Ancient of Days, 1794.
This summer, Welsh National Opera invites us to dive
into unknowable realms of the psyche with the season theme ‘A Terrible
Innocence’. Two new productions will explore the danger and
destructiveness which can lurk beneath an apparently benign surface: WNO
Artistic Director and CEO David Pountney will stage Debussy’s ravishing
impressionist masterpiece Pelléas et Mélisande, alongside the UK premiere of Richard Ayres’ wildly inventive Peter Pan, directed by Keith Warner. Of course, innocence is one of opera’s most prevalent motifs.
From comedy to tragedy, tales of moral misadventure abound, and operatic
history is littered with the corpses of heroines – it’s almost always
women – who pay the ultimate price for some wrongdoing, real or
imagined.
But in opera, as in life, things are seldom simple. And around
the turn of the 19th century – when Debussy chose Maeterlinck’s
symbolist play for the libretto of his first (and only completed) opera,
and JM Barrie turned his fantastical novel into a children’s play – a
new, existential anxiety was in the air. Social roles and values were
being challenged, just as deep drives within the unconscious were being
unmasked. Old certainties were dissolving into mystery and metaphor,
fuelling new art which, for us today, remains liberating and disquieting
in equal measure.
WNO’s Pelléas takes as its starting point the company’s award-winning 2013 staging of Berg’s Lulu; a twin landmark of operatic psychological insight. As Pountney explores below, in conversation with Steph Power amidst rehearsals, Pelléas too features a heroine of mysterious origin and apparent vulnerability who brings disaster to her adopted world.
Similarly timeless and otherworldly, Peter Pan is the archetypal
boy who refuses to grow up. He signals faerie enchantment and adventure
for the Darling children, but the Neverland to which he entices them is
part-shadowed by cruelty, entrapment and physical threat. Musically,
Barrie’s alluring tale offers the perfect vehicle for the 49-year-old
Ayres; a composer of offbeat stylistic melanges with his own, Peter
Pan-like creative vigour. Indeed, according to his ‘imagined biography’,
aged 14, Ayres ‘ran away from home to become second cabin-boy aboard
“the Redshank”, a merchantman.’*
Peter Pan (2013, libretto by Lavinia Greenlaw), will be conducted
by Erik Nielsen, whilst WNO’s acclaimed Music Director, Lothar Koenigs,
will take the baton for Pelléas. With strong casts all round, there will also be another chance to see Dominic Cooke’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (conducted by Simon Phillippo).
The season opens next Saturday May 16 with Peter Pan. The Magic Flute follows on May 22, with Pelléas et Mélisande on May 29; all three at Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre, then touring.
Steph Power: Could we start by talking about your evocative, provocative season title, ‘A Terrible Innocence’?
David Pountney: Yes of course – it’s meant to provoke discussion! It
seemed to me that these two pieces are about people who appear to be
innocent but who have the capability of causing great harm; that
innocence is sometimes a disguise for something much more predatory or
dangerous.
Susan Sontag went even further when she wrote about Pelléas,
describing a ‘pathological innocence’. She contends that all the
protagonists – not just Mélisande – inhabit an unhealthy realm of
‘incurable vulnerability’ as she put it, with connotations of disease
and decline. Does that go too far?
Well, they are all in a state of morbidity aren’t they? And also in a
state of arrested development. That is, Mélisande appears to be in a
state of arrested development, and so does Pelléas, actually; they’re
neither of them responsible. That’s partly to do with this kind of
hermetically sealed, clearly very unhealthy environment in which they’re
living. But that is interesting – and wasn’t it Debussy who was
horrified about the whole idea of certainty?
Yes!
The piece is trying very hard to be uncertain all the time. And of
course there’s a very nice paradox there because my colleagues are
always fussing about whether Debussy really wrote F# in that bar; why he
wrote ‘à la touche’ here and not there; all of those things! The music
is at the same time something which is so tremendously certain, everyone
pores over the score. Yet actually his entire ethos is to create a very
studied level of ambiguity whereby you never know who is responsible
for anything.
The piece hovers in an invisible, subterranean world – a
world of suggestion rather than statement. You never know what Mélisande
may be feeling.
I wonder actually if she isn’t psychopathic in a way. Because
although she’s very nice to everybody, she doesn’t engage with anybody
emotionally. At the end she says, ‘is Golaud here? Why doesn’t he come
and see me?’ Everybody else is fretting about how she’s going to react
to this man who nearly murdered her, but she doesn’t register that at
all.
No, and she refuses to tell Golaud on her death bed whether she loved Pelléas.
I don’t think she knows the answer to that. This is why I was so
interested to draw this very explicit parallel between her and Lulu:
because they’re both people who never accept responsibility in a moral
sense.
I understand that you take as a starting point your production of Lulu.
Are there any theatrical or visual parallels to watch out for? I’m
thinking, for instance, that Maeterlinck is said to have once favoured
marionette-style acting, and that a key visual trope of your Lulu was the Hans Bellmer-type jointed doll which captured her essence.
No, there’s nothing puppet-like about this. But it does all take
place within the same environment, and it even starts the same: this
body bag is brought on, and Mélisande emerges from it like a sort of
nymph. So in a way, she’s born like something out of a chrysalis. And
it’s very clear to me that, although everybody says ‘follow me’, she
always knows exactly where she is going.
The crumbling castle reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher [an opera on which Debussy died without completing, and which David recently produced at WNO]. The castle of the ‘Allemonde’ – that’s an interesting word actually isn’t it?!
Meaning ‘all the world’. Yes, totally! Well of course there’s a huge
link with Poe. Debussy was very impressed with Poe, and all the French
authors of that period were – especially Baudelaire, who translated him.
So yes, the piece is stuffed full of Poe.
That murkiness of the house, with water everywhere after a drought. You get the feeling of being sucked down.
A miasma! You get that in Usher don’t you? There’s the light that comes from this algae in the pond.
Mélisande is a creature who’s arrested in her development as
you say. And yet on her death bed, she’s just given birth to an infant
daughter.
Are you sure that the child at the end is Golaud’s?
No, not at all! Do you make anything of that paternal uncertainty, or do you leave it hanging?
Well I do treat Mélisande as an active sexual being. Again like Lulu,
it wouldn’t occur to her to desist if Pelléas wanted it, so it’s
perfectly possible that Pelléas is the father. I’m not really in a
position to make it clearer than that! But some people play her as this
little waif and I think she’s much, much more knowing. Also the way she
lies is very significant, it’s very confident and knowing. She’s not
going to murder anyone but she is the cause of murder in others. And she
wafts about as if she’s got nothing to do with it.
When we first see her, it’s suggested that she’s been traumatised.
There’s the crown in the water. She’s come from another disaster.
With the implication that she’s probably caused that one too?
Oh I think definitely! My dream is to complete this trio of pieces with Ariane et Barbe-bleu [the 1906 opera by Paul Dukas] in which Mélisande appears as one of Bluebeard’s wives.
That would be exciting! I’ve also read ideas about her – vis-à-vis Pelléas – being Bluebeard’s eighth wife.
In Ariane she’s one of the seven. Ariane is the seventh and
last – she’s the one who tries to save them all. There is a Bluebeard-y
element in this production, actually. Which you’ll see …
Aha! There was a real fascination with these characters and the unknown wasn’t there? Bartók too produced a Bluebeard’s Castle [1911]. It all seems to tie in with notions of Symbolist literature where to define is, in a sense, to destroy.
Yes, this comes back to the notion of clarity or certainty. They
wanted to leave these things as ambiguous symbols. Take the scene in Pelléas
with Yniold [Golaud’s son from his former marriage], where he’s lost
the golden ball. The golden ball is hidden under the rock but you can
waste hours trying to work out what this means! It means bugger all –
it’s just a nice symbol.
People love trying to work out who the mysterious shepherd is who appears in that scene.
Yes – you’ll see I have taken a view on that scene …
Ah, more intriguing still! I have to ask – does the Wanderer make an appearance? [In Wagner’s Ring, the Wanderer is the god Wotan in disguise. He appeared to striking effect in David’s production of Lulu.]
Well, there is that figure who brings on the body bag …
Right! … It’s often said that Pelléas is tricky to stage due
to the amount of silence involved; where the characters don’t sing, but
remain on stage and have to hold the tension. And the singing itself is
very ‘interior’ by comparison to some people’s expectations of opera.
How do you find that? Does it put particular strains on the singers?
You know, I find absolutely not. I find it puts strain on the audience! Because there are people who are infuriated by Pelléas –
which I can’t understand at all. But there are people who are waiting
for a forthright, Verdian musical declamation of the situation, and they
never get it. And there are people who feel you spend the whole evening
chasing threads which just evaporate under the door as you get to them.
Which I think is fabulous. And we’ve got a wonderful cast, so if you’ve
got good actors there’s no problem to stage it. I think some audiences
have a problem to accept music being such a chimera really.
People keep looking for the form.
Yes – and the big tunes! But of course there are tunes galore in this piece. I think it’s one of the most ravishing scores.
Me too – it’s fabulous! And both Debussy and Maeterlinck have
been described as the ‘quiet radicals’ who changed everything. Many
different composers have responded to the play – from Sibelius to Fauré
to Schoenberg – so it clearly captured the imagination. But it seems to
me that Debussy realises the play’s essence – and with exquisite music.
It was very radical at the time to take a prose play and effectively
just lop the first scene off as he did.
And set it all parlando, basically.
The vocal lines themselves are actually very naturalistic, using tiny intervals.
Yes – and they’re very difficult to memorise as I’ve been discovering!
What’s the relationship between literary and visual inspiration for Debussy in Pelléas do you feel? The word ‘impressionist’ is often applied to his music –
– which he hated. I’m not quite sure why he did but he did,
apparently. Perhaps he didn’t like being lumped in with all those
painters! Well, Maeterlinck had lots of Edward Burne-Joneses on his wall
didn’t he – and all those Walter Crane fairytale illustrations?** So he
knew all of that English world of Pre-Raphaelite medievalism. I think
Maeterlinck was very influenced by that, and I think Debussy probably
followed; that’s obviously what he was thinking about. And of course, Tristan und Isolde sits so firmly behind Pelléas. It’s as if Pelléas is really the obverse of Tristan; it’s everything that Tristan isn’t. But by so being, in his own utterly individual way, Debussy comes incredibly close to it.
How do you see that working with the piece itself, that Tristan–Pelléas duality if you like?
I guess it’s because what interests Debussy, as Wagner in fact, is
the inside of the apparatus of the story. They’re both in a way very
slender stories aren’t they? There are very few incidents and very few
facts, and a vast amount of supposition and exploration of emotional,
psychological states.
And interesting too that should you mention the Crane, that whole Edwardian world.
Yes, that takes us into Peter Pan!
Image courtesy of Welsh National Opera.
Interestingly,
in terms of Art Nouveau, there’s George Frampton’s sculpture of Peter
Pan [1912] in Kensington Gardens which mightn’t look out of place in
Paris. Yes, the terrible innocence of Peter Pan – but perhaps he’s not so naughty as Mr Darling, who’s rather hopeless!?
Well Mr Darling is completely infantile really isn’t he? What’s so
fascinating about that story is that it’s so satirical in many ways, and
so psychologically acute about Victorian bourgeois parenthood and this
frightful male world, where the obverse of Mr Darling is Captain Hook –
all this public school nonsense about dying like gentlemen! The story is
brilliantly multi-faceted. It’s a romp, it’s an adventure, and it’s an
actually quite tragic psychological description of the lot of women.
Poor Mrs Darling, grieving all the time because her fling or not-fling
with Peter Pan has gone forever and she’s stuck with Mr Darling. Poor
little Wendy being turned into a frightful little housewife.
First they shoot her down, then they build her a house – and tell her to get going with the chores!
Yes, straight to the sewing!
It’s quite a world isn’t it?
It is. It’s full of very dark corners. But it manages to go on being a
romp and an adventure at the same time. I think it’s brilliant, and I
think Richard’s music is absolutely perfect for it.
Yes, the ebullience and downright wild control, actually, of
Richard’s music seems perfect. I can imagine kids, too, absolutely
loving it. But it is very dark. I was just thinking of Lulu
where you have Dr Schön mirrored by Jack the Ripper. In a way here we
have Mr Darling mirrored by Captain Hook, flipping between the two.
Right! Yes, in my programme note I’ve compared the battle between
Lulu and Dr Schön with the battle between Golaud and Mélisande. Golaud
is constantly trying to pin her down and she’s constantly eluding him.
While Pelléas is essentially Alwa [Schön’s son and Lulu’s
lover], who doesn’t know how to cope, who’s drawn in by Mélisande’s
magnetism?
Yes. I haven’t yet found the moment for her to seduce Genevieve!
She’s seduced everyone else in the piece by the time we get to the end.
I’m just slightly missing that one moment.
There’s an interesting moment they have looking out over the sea – isn’t that when Pelléas’s boat appears in the distance?
No, it’s her boat leaving. It’s going to have a shipwreck they all say.
Of course, I remember. So she’s trapped with them – or they with her!
Yes, it’s a kind of Agatha Christie: ‘the car drove off down the drive and the snow started to fall’!
Genevieve’s an interesting character in that she appears to have no interest! What’s her function?
I don’t know, I haven’t found what’s interesting about her! I guess
she’s really an exposition device: to read the letter at the beginning
and to tell you who everybody is. She’s completely silent at the end;
she doesn’t say a single word, but just comes on and off with the baby.
So, of the two female characters we see in the opera, one is
an exposition device and the other is the most dangerous magnet – who is
completely passive.
Completely passive, yes that’s right. It’s brilliant the way
Mélisande plays the scene with Golaud so that after he’s been injured –
which is an interesting point, because apparently she has magic powers;
the moment she throws his ring away he falls off his horse! – when
they’re working through the outcome of that, it’s brilliant the way in
which she lets the conversation go on, to the point where Golaud orders
her to go with Pelléas into the grotto. So ultimately she’s sent there
by her husband.
Golaud seems ‘innocently guilty’ in the sense that, although he murders Pelléas, he’s utterly wretched.
He’s a blunderer really, and he’s all the time being tortured by
somebody with a rapier whilst he’s there swinging a club. He’s being
dissected, provoked.
She has a go at old King Arkel as well doesn’t she – teases him?
Oh yes.
She’s cruel and ruthless. And yet there’s the twist that, at the beginning as we’ve said, she appears to have been traumatised.
I think that’s right, yes. You start off being invited to be sympathetic to her. Poor little girl found by the roadside!
So how do you see the character of Pan by comparison – I know
Keith Warner is directing that so it’s not your production, but in
terms of the season theme?
Again I think he’s someone who seduces by arrested development
really. He’s allowed to go on playing the child long after he should
have given it up, and thereby can pretend to be innocent as Mélisande
does. The one thing is, I don’t think there’s any suggestion of Peter
Pan being sexually active whereas Mélisande very definitely is.
It’s interesting how what’s often dismissed as ‘children’s
literature’ can explore the same issues as adult literature but in a
very different way. And there’s a lot of moral caution in Peter Pan.
Yes definitely.
Is there an equivalent in Pelléas? Other than ‘don’t pick up strange girls’?!
‘Off the side of ponds’! Yes: don’t believe you are master of somebody just because they appear to be vulnerable.
That’s very thought-provoking. And you’re talking about power
and control amidst apparent destiny and fate. Mélisande dies, but
there’s nothing more for her to do because she’s sucked the life force
out of everybody else.
Yes, she’s destroyed the castle, effectively.
Just as in Usher. I do hope you get to do Ariane et Barbe-bleu – that would be absolutely wonderful.
Yes it would. And of course it would be wonderful to be able to do that with Lulu and Pelléas et Mélisande together.
Here’s to that. Thank you for talking with me.
* You can also hear music by Richard Ayres at the Vale of Glamorgan
Festival, which starts this Tuesday, May 12, running to Saturday May 23.
** Edward Burne-Jones was an English painter, closely associated with
the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and Walter Crane was a prolific English
artist and designer best remembered for his illustrations of children’s
books.
In 2012, Welsh National Opera commissioned a new,
bilingual opera from composer Pwyll ap Siôn and poet Menna Elfyn. The
result was Gair ar Gnawd (‘Word on Flesh’): a piece which puts
the community centre stage in telling the story of two very different
people who find they must overcome their prejudices and work together to
defeat a threat from a greedy property developer. At the opera’s heart
lies the struggle between tradition and innovation, and the challenges
faced by individuals and communities in grappling with social change.
A new production, directed by Angharad Lee, will premiere in Llanelli at Y Ffwrnes, this Saturday, April 18, to be broadcast on S4C on Saturday April 25
(with a documentary about the opera broadcast on Wednesday April 22),
and preceded by a schools’ matinee Friday April 17 .* It features a
40-strong Llanelli-based community choir performing alongside WNO
soloists, supported by a semi-chorus of eight young Welsh singers aged
18 – 26, found through auditions held by WNO’s Youth Opera in Cardiff
and Caernarfon.
For this staging, Pwyll has composed additional music. Ahead of rehearsals, Steph Power visited him at Bangor University, where he is a Professor of Music, to find out more. They spoke about the story and spirit of Gair ar Gnawd; how it came about, and how his opera opens a window on a range of issues pertinent to life in modern-day Wales and beyond.
Gair ar Gnawd was commissioned, and premiered by
Welsh National Opera in 2012, as an opera/oratorio. But I understand
you’ve revised the piece for its Llanelli performances. Will there will
be a fuller staging?
Yes, when it was done the first time round, we had limited resources,
so, although there was a sort of set with props and so on, it was
essentially a static type of staging. But now, with further investment,
we have a proper, specially-designed set, and people can say with
confidence that it’s an opera rather than an oratorio. But then, in the
early stages we were also just a bit tentative about using the word
‘opera’ as it’s often associated with something grand and on a big scale
with lots of different elements and forces involved.
Yes. Thankfully people are now also seeing, I think, that
opera comes in all shapes and sizes, and can utilise all sorts of
diverse resources and settings.
And an opera’s length can vary from literally a few minutes to several hours, so it’s a very flexible term. Gair ar Gnawd is about an hour long.
How did the opera come about initially? You’ve set a text by the renowned Welsh poet Menna Elfyn.
Menna and I were approached by Rhian Hutchings, then project leader
for WNO Max, in around 2010-11 to create a bilingual opera/oratorio. So
we got together, and the starting point was the translation of the Bible
into Welsh; Menna had done some interesting research into the
background of William Morgan, who made that first translation in 1588.
He led a colourful life for someone who’s now remembered for translating
the Bible, and slept with a gun beneath his pillow! Menna was keen to
incorporate his life into some kind of story, but in the end we decided
to do something more contemporary, bring the story up to date.
There are two main characters in the opera. One is a kind of
present-day William Morgan; a man who’s translating the Bible into
minority languages. So there’s actually a little bit of Maltese in the
opera as well as Welsh.
There’s Hindi too isn’t there? And the opera’s title
translates literally into English as ‘Word on Flesh’ – so words are
clearly key.
Yes, Hindi is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world,
and so the opera has both smaller and larger languages. And words are
important to both main characters in different ways. The second main
character is a female tattoo artist. When words are tattooed onto skin,
they can take on an almost religious iconography and symbolism. Of
course, going back to ancient times, tattooing’s always been an integral
part of certain cultures – the Māori in New Zealand and so on.
How do you explore these ideas in the piece? What’s the story?
The two main characters, Anwar and Awen, work in an arts centre.
They’ve never met as they have separate rooms, where he works on his
translations and she works as a tattooist. But the building is
threatened by businessmen who plan to turn it into a casino, and they
happen to meet in a state of angry panic about their eviction. Initially
they’re very suspicious of each other because they come from very
different backgrounds and they disagree on a number of points. But they
realise the only way they’re going to overcome the forces of
globalisation that are trying to take over the building is to unite and
to pressurise local councillors into seeing it from their side. So
there’s the idea of materialistic elements impinging on the lives of
these people and the whole question of standing by your principles and
the things you value – whether you’re a tattooist or a translator of the
Bible. Community Chorus member Idris Morris JonesSo the subject is relevant to contemporary local concerns
everywhere. You’ve got issues of identity and change, community
cohesion, threats from outside forces: lots there that people will have
experienced in everyday life.
Yes, and the whole idea of cultural domination and interaction. How
cultures and languages can co-exist with different viewpoints. Anwen and
Awen are very different at the beginning of the opera, and they remain
very different throughout – at the end, there’s no easy resolution
between them. But they go through a process of re-evaluating themselves
in relation to the other person, and hopefully end up with a more open
mind, and the ability to recognise diversity and be tolerant of other
beliefs and views and values.
How does that work dramatically? Can you say something about how the text and the music work together?
Rhian had said she wanted the opera to be bilingual. I think there’s
probably a little bit more Welsh than English in it but when it’s
performed in Llanelli there’ll be surtitles. So it’ll be possible to
follow in both languages – because we have surtitles for operas in
English too of course!
Yes, even at English National Opera, where they sing every
opera in English – whether it’s the original language or in translation!
But language itself seems to be at the heart of your opera, and of
course the bilingual aspect, too, reflects many people’s everyday life
in Wales.
Inevitably, especially these days. I think a lot of Welsh speakers
mix Welsh and English – there’s a sort of fusion of languages going on.
You get it in pop music too. There are bands like Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci
[1991-2006] who went to Welsh language schools but came from English
language backgrounds, so it was perfectly natural for them to swap from
one language to the other – and they played on some of those ideas in
their songs. They had an album called Bwyd Time which means ‘Food Time’, so there’s a codal mixing going on.
There’s an element of that in the opera. The two main characters
generally sing in Welsh but a lot of the chorus parts are sung in
English. The opera starts with a setting of the St John’s Bible ‘In the
beginning was the word’ sung in both languages one after the other. So
in that sense the translation is already there in the setting. There are
points where Welsh and English appear next to each other, and separate
numbers sung in either language.
Do you approach the languages differently at all in the way you set them?
Not consciously, because over the years I’ve set things in both Welsh
and English. But the two languages do work quite differently really,
and sometimes it is difficult to set the same text in both to the same
music.
How did you arrive at the format? There’s a big community choir involved I see, and also a semi-chorus.
Actually the semi-chorus is a new element for the new production. In
the first production the level of experience and musical ability for the
community chorus was very wide; some had never sung before, and some
were really semi-professional, so it was a real mix. So I had to bear
that in mind when I was composing. This time, the new semi-chorus
comprises student singers from conservatoires – the Guildhall, Royal
Northern and so on. They’re not just talented but motivated and keen to
be involved. So I’ve composed some additional music for this second
production and what I’ve written now is maybe a bit more challenging
because the goal posts have shifted a little. But the style is still
very direct.
You’ve written books on minimalism, on Michael Nyman
and so on. Also, as a composer, you’ve talked about being influenced by
minimalists such as Philip Glass and John Adams (as they’re often still
described). Actually for this opera you’ve spoken of wanting to
‘combine the spirit of Monteverdi with minimalism’, which sounds
intriguing. Could you expand on that?
Well, I think opera tries to capture the essence of things in
different ways: the human condition, those sorts of questions. I guess
that would have been at the root of what the early opera composers were
trying to do, thinking back to Monteverdi and his opera Orfeo.
They were also looking back to Greek mythology themselves in creating
this new form. So I suppose I’d like to think my opera engages with some
of those issues, but clearly using stylistic features which are more
associated with present-day operatic practice.
It’s difficult for any opera composer these days to write an opera
without thinking about Glass and Adams: Glass because he’s written so
many, and Adams because his operas have proved so powerful and so
popular. Not that I’m suggesting that this is on the same scale!
Actually what’s interesting about Glass is that his operatic language
has gone down one of two main strands really: of chamber operas and
grand operas. I suppose I was thinking a little bit along the lines of
his chamber operas.
Glass calls them ‘pocket operas’, which I think is a lovely term.
Yes, easy to carry around: to transport and to tour. So many grand
operas are staged then forgotten about, never performed again, or very
rarely. Which hopefully is different for pocket operas and for community
operas.
Picking up your point about looking back to the Greeks, I
found myself wondering whether your choruses have a function akin to a
Greek chorus at any point, as a kind of witness or commentator within
the narrative? What role or roles do they play?
In talking about her production, our director, Angharad Lee,
describes the semi-chorus in particular in terms of peeling layers from
an onion; the characters have different characters within themselves,
which get revealed as layers peel away. And I think the chorus does
function a little bit like that. It’s chameleon-like and changes
according to the situation. Sometimes they represent the businessmen,
sometimes they’re the councillors, sometimes they sympathise with Anwar
and Awen, sometimes they question what their motives are. So yes they
play a number of roles at different times.
Does that bring us back to language in the sense of shifting dialogues within the piece?
Yes and there’s a complexity there. In any bilingual society it’s
very easy to start thinking in black and white, in terms of opposites.
But I think we live in an age where distinctions are far more blurred
and it’s finding a happy medium that’s difficult. Even writing this
opera it was difficult finding a medium that’s between using the two
languages and trying to allow them to lie comfortably with one another. I
think that was the idea that Rhian had in mind originally. That sense
of conflict but also of resolution that’s there on a linguistic as well
as a dramatic level in the opera.
I’m aware that, all her life, Menna has been an activist on
various fronts, most famously perhaps with the Welsh language. So I
wonder how much of that, if anything, you share, and whether that comes
through the opera at all?
The opera isn’t intended to present a political viewpoint as such –
well it certainly wasn’t our intention to do that, although people might
read that into it. Yes, Menna’s been involved with Cymdeithas yr Iaith
(the Welsh Language Society) and actually my Mum was on that first ever
protest, in 1963, on the Trefechan Bridge in Aberyswyth – strangely enough she was a student at the time, at Bangor University [where Pwyll is a Professor of Music]!
The Welsh language and the history of the protest movement in Wales
is very associated with Welsh liberalism really, and with universities,
and Menna’s a part of that history. It’s quite different in Scotland I
think; the Scottish National Party is more based on principals defining
the labour and socialist movements, whereas in Wales, before Plaid Cymru
was founded as a political party, a lot of those people were liberals.
So, it didn’t come so much from the Valleys; well, the Welsh heartland
is really – or used to be – in the countryside, the rural areas, farming
communities and so on.
I’ve never been actively involved in any protest movement but it is
associated in some ways with – well I wouldn’t want to say
intellectuals, that sounds wrong! But just think about someone like
Meredydd Evans who passed away recently; a wonderful ambassador for
Welsh music, especially in terms of ethnomusicology in Wales [see this piece by Sarah Hill,
written before Merêd passed away in February this year, aged 95]. He
was a very staunch language campaigner who had also studied philosophy
at Princeton University in America. So I think he typifies to an extent
that kind of strand within Welsh culture that’s been there really since
the turn of the 20th century.
Which seems, from what you’re saying, to be about looking outwards as well as inwards?
I’d like to think so, yes, because that’s what the whole liberal
movement is about. I think there are often two forms of nationalism: an
inward-looking one and an outward-looking one. And maybe that’s another
site of conflict or tension, which is there in Wales as it is in other
parts of society and other parts of the world.
Especially other places where people are finding their
identity under threat from global forces which run roughshod over things
that have been held dear for generations.
Yes. Or those societies that have established themselves over
centuries then find themselves changing due to ethnography. How people
deal with that is complex. You think of somewhere like Cardiff which is
so multicultural really, but in a very positive way on the whole. But
there are other cities where those tensions are apparent – people are
finding it difficult to coexist. Maybe there’s no clear answer or true
resolution to some of those issues.
But these are important issues to find ourselves discussing in relation to your opera!
Yes! If the opera ends up doing that then I’m more than happy because
the opera is about so much more than the music. If it enables people to
talk about their lives and the world around them and see it in a
different light through the experience of opera, maybe that goes back to
Monteverdi and to what he and other composers had in mind many
centuries ago!
Yes. Opera has always existed on lots of levels, from fantasy and entertainment, to deep, conscious engagement with the world.
There was a time when classical or art music – whatever you want to
call it – was losing touch with audiences. But I think it’s reassuring
these days to see that a number of operatic productions are being very
well attended. And hopefully minimalism as a style – whatever that means
and whatever off-shoots resulted from it – has in some way brought a
kind of change, since minimalism has one foot in art music and one foot
in the vernacular.
I’m not a big fan of musicals – I find a lot of musicals draw upon
styles that are generic and clichéd – and in Welsh language culture,
there’s a certain kind of musical theatre that’s considered to be this
wonderful medium. I find that quite difficult to buy into, so I’d like
to think this opera is not a musical for a start! But it isn’t an opera
in the sense that a lot of contemporary opera is, of having a highly
dissonant language, or of being uncompromising on a number of levels
which may be impenetrable to a lot of people. Hopefully it will
communicate and will have a positive impact on people – they’ll be able
to relate to it.
Well I believe the opera went down extremely well when it was
performed in Caenarfon in 2012! Many thanks, Pwyll, and best of luck
for Llanelli and the broadcast.
* Gair ar Gnawd will be performed at Y Ffwrnes,
Llanelli, on Saturday 18 April at 7pm, and on Friday 17 April there will
be a closed matinee performance for local schools at 1.15pm. The full production and a 30-minute documentary about the project
will be broadcast on S4C the week following the live performance.
Filmed by Rondo Media, the documentary will follow the cast and
directors from auditions through the rehearsal process and the final
performances.
Photographs of Community Chorus members by Jeni Clegg.
Mark Bowden has been Resident Composer at the BBC
National Orchestra of Wales since June 2011. Born in Wales, 1979, Mark’s
association with BBC NOW has been especially fruitful, with three major
new commissions punctuating an exciting series of performance and
education projects. His most substantial piece yet is A Violence of Gifts,
scored for soprano, baritone, chorus and orchestra, to a specially
commissioned libretto by the Welsh poet and writer Owen Sheers.
Inspired by Haydn’s oratorio, The Creation (1797-8), the
piece explores the origins of light, matter and life. Crucially,
though, Mark and Owen come from a 21st century perspective in weaving
together some of the very latest scientific theories and discoveries,
including some they learned about whilst visiting the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research,
beneath the Franco-Swiss border.
It seems fitting that the world premiere of A Violence of Gifts
will take place just as the LHC has been switched on for a second time,
in search of further discoveries about our universe and life on earth.
On Saturday April 18 at Cardiff’s St David’s Hall – and broadcast live
by BBC Radio 3 – the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales,
conducted by Martyn Brabbins, will be joined by soloists Elizabeth
Atherton and Roderick Williams in a programme which also includes
Holsts’ The Planets.
Ahead of rehearsals, Mark spoke with me about A Violence of Gifts,
and what led him to its extraordinary subject matter. Together they
explore many ideas, from the interplay of music, poetry and science, to
Haydn and the Enlightenment, and the vital role that creative freedom
plays in all fields of human endeavour.
Steph Power: Your new piece, A Violence of Gifts, is all about origins and genesis, so I’d like to ask you about the genesis of the piece itself. How did it come about?
Mark Bowden: It’s been a long time in the making. The first meeting
was in December 2011, a few months after I started my residency at BBC
NOW. I was just finishing my Cello Concerto when they asked me what I’d
like to do for my next two pieces. I ended up writing Heartland
next – the Percussion Concerto – which was a collaboration with
National Dance Company Wales. But I said I also really wanted to write a
piece with the chorus in the future.
I told them my idea for the piece and they were so supportive, they
just said yes. The actual idea was much older; I’d been thinking about
it since before I started with the orchestra. It’s being said a lot now
that this piece is a modern-day Creation and it’s not really!
But I have always been interested in Haydn’s oratorio. Actually I’m
interested in the first movement; Haydn’s harmony, the unresolved
cadences, the strange tonality. And I’m interested in the story about
how he came to write it; his astronomical study with William Herschel.
Haydn’s said to have been amazed at what he saw through Herschel’s telescope on a visit to him.
Yes, Richard Holmes writes about it in The Age of Wonder.
Herschel’s telescope had the largest lens yet created and was based at
Slough; a more rural place then, with a good view of the stars.
So the idea of The Creation as a starting point for a piece
had been there in the back of my mind. And at BBC NOW we talked about
making not a season, but a group of concerts, which is how my piece
comes to be programmed alongside Holst’s The Planets, and The Creation will be performed in May.
Could you say something about the meeting of music, poetry and science in your piece?
Two of my really strong interests outside music are poetry and
physics – particularly stuff to do with space. When I’m writing any
piece I’m often inspired by poetry and text or by some sort of natural
phenomena, and I normally look at some scientific aspect of that. So
bringing those two things together for this piece made a lot of sense
for me. I also wanted the subject matter to be the most up-to-date ideas
and knowledge about the origins of the universe. So it’s about the Big
Bang, and it’s about matter and antimatter and all of these things. I
looked around at first to find an existing text, but soon realised that
wouldn’t be possible. So I raised funds to commission a new text, which
was a separate project.
I gather you first encountered your librettist, Owen Sheers, at the Hay Festival?
Yes, I didn’t know Owen, but I really liked his talk at the festival. I bought his early poetry collection, Skirrid Hill,
and loved his imagery and economy of means, which I felt I needed for
this kind of text. I just wrote to him, told him my idea, and we met up.
He really liked it. Mark Bowden and Owen Sheers at CERNSo, effectively, you went from Herschel’s telescope to the
Large Hadron Collider at CERN – the 21st century equivalent I guess –
which you and Owen visited together as part of your research?
Exactly, that really is the idea! Actually Owen knew Ariane Koek – in
fact she was at the Hay Festival so it was quite serendipitous. At the
time she was running the Arts at CERN programme. They arrange
residencies and research visits for artists.
And I was in my element there, I have to say! Owen was too; like me, he’s fascinated by all this stuff.
So there’s the irony of this incredible, expansive idea
arriving amidst terrible destruction. And of course that’s when Holst
wrote The Planets too; right in the midst of that dreadful maelstrom.
Absolutely, it’s amazing. And CERN itself is an interesting marriage
of the repercussions of war and science, I guess. We were told how it
was seen as a mechanism for bringing about peace in Europe and bringing
people together. Someone actually used the word ‘apology’; an apology to
the world for having created the bomb, and a chance to have nuclear
research for peaceful means and the good of humanity rather than for
destruction.
That’s key isn’t it – how we choose to apply new discoveries
and knowledge. Which brings me in a way to wider notions of creativity,
and to the cosmogenic narrative of A Violence of Gifts. I believe you’re very interested in the idea that ‘everything comes from nothing’?
Yes. I hadn’t heard of that concept until I started researching this piece, but I was reading Lawrence M. Krauss’s book, A Universe From Nothing,
about the origins of the universe. Apparently the main narrative now is
that a vacuum is not ‘empty’ at all; rather, a vacuum is full of matter
and antimatter being continually created and destroyed. And the
question ‘why is there something’, or ‘where did it all come from’:
Krauss discusses how it would be absurd for there NOT to be a universe,
because of that discovery. Because, in any vacuum, we see matter and
antimatter continuously just popping into existence.
Oh, ok. The idea that nature abhors a vacuum?
Yes, exactly. This infinitesimally small ‘spot’ that the universe
would have occupied would have been bursting with ‘stuff’ that just had
to go somewhere. And this happens all the time. If we were to make a
vacuum now, we would be able to observe it happening if we had the right
instruments. Little tiny universes, perhaps, bursting into existence.
That’s fascinating. And I wonder how – or whether – that
might work musically, in your piece? For instance, in the Haydn, it’s
not so much that he juxtaposes chaos and order, say, but that he simply
starts with nothing – with a void if you like – and effectively fills it
with sound. Does that bear any relation to how you approach A Violence of Gifts?
Maybe, to a degree. I guess the act of writing anything – whether
it’s poetry or music or coming up with an idea – in some sense is making
something from nothing. And in the temporal arts, there’s silence and
then the music starts. So on that level perhaps it’s a metaphor for all
music and all art. But the thing I really drew from the Haydn was his
harmonic material, which might not be apparent in my piece when you hear
it, but is there on a molecular level if you like; these strange
juxtapositions of major and minor tonalities that Haydn uses, these
unresolved cadences – which are almost proto-Wagnerian sometimes,
particularly in the opening movement.
Then later in The Creation there’s an aria, ‘In native
worth’: he starts in C major, then modulates to G, then goes to Ab
major. This isn’t startling to us now, but it was very startling to
audiences in the 1790s. To those three pitches, C, G and Ab I added Db.
Then I thought of E as being in the middle of those, so I made a sort of
mirror image around E: with C and Db, G and Ab. If you like, they’ve
become the atoms of my piece harmonically, and in terms of line and
pitch. So I really did take something fundamental from the Haydn –
although not a quotation.
So you’re using that material as a kind of structural kernal rather than something that’s intended to be audible?
Yes, that’s it. And for myself, I just hear these notes, these pitch
relationships, all the time when I’m thinking about the piece – though I
haven’t heard the orchestra play it yet! The whole piece just abounds
with those patterns and shapes. Perhaps if you’re listening and you have
that sort of sensitivity to intervals you might hear that going on.
Right, I’ll listen out! Yes, and the way Haydn used harmony,
and orchestration too – I’m thinking more on technology here – even the
blazing C major chord that Haydn has at ‘Let there be light’! At the
time, that was seen as what we’d now call a technological effect. It
would have almost literally blown people away – and it’s a kind of
mixing of art and science.
Yes, there’s some quite unusual orchestration in The Creation.
He uses the contrabassoon, which was a fairly new instrument at the
time. And he does use, as you say, these technological effects – timbral
surprises to represent the whale or the worm – all sorts of different
things. And actually that’s been an influence for me as well. I use the
contrabassoon, which is not so startling now, but I’ve also got the
contrabass clarinet which is an octave below the bass clarinet – this is
the first time I’ve written for it. There are some key passages where
those two instruments have a solo group with the double-basses and the
tuba. They have melodies which wind around each other. I know these will
sound muddy; you won’t be able to hear the detail necessarily, but the
effect was an inspiration from Haydn.
Before we look in more detail at your piece, I’m curious to
know how you feel about people’s tendency to separate art and science
into distinct categories? To me, this feels a false and uncreative way
to look at the world!
Yes! To me the separation of art and science is completely false, and
I don’t think artists are more creative than scientists. But I do think
there are people, whatever their field, who are open to questioning and
to new ideas, and then there are types – of behaviour rather than
people, probably – where you’re a bit closed down, and just carry on
with what you know. Probably the majority of us are a bit more like the
latter. But it’s only when you have people, and sometimes institutions –
I think CERN is one of the very few – who are willing to respectfully
throw out everything that’s gone before, that practice can be pushed
forward. Whether that’s scientific discovery or composition.
Haydn was a composer of the Enlightenment, and that thinking is very apparent in The Creation,
despite the religiosity of the text – and that it was written a bit
later perhaps, just after the French Revolution. So I was wondering
whether aspects of Enlightenment thinking influenced your piece?
Especially the idea of reason being a means to liberty; a light shining
in the darkness, if you like – which was not necessarily anti-religion
(and certainly not in the theological Haydn) but, still, part of a wider
struggle to counter the authoritarian dogma of the church.
Those ideas really resonated with me, and with Owen, when we were
writing the piece, yes, and Owen alludes to this quite strongly within
the text. I hope we don’t offend anyone as it’s not supposed to be an
anti-religious piece. It is about science, and today’s scientific
narrative of where the universe came from. Obviously that will be
different in ten or fifteen year’s time and the piece itself will be
confined to history. But there’s a beautiful line, let me see …
… is it, ‘the faithful cannot search or make a story new’?
That was the line which prompted my question, anyway – it’s a powerful
line!
That’s the one! We recorded everything at CERN, and Owen drew a lot
of ideas from conversations we had with people there. Someone said,
talking about science, that those faithful to scientific dogma, or who
are partisan, or who insist on particular theories being right, can’t
search for new stories. At CERN they want people who are completely
prepared to say the Big Bang never happened! Or, I guess, in the past it
would have been throwing out the idea that the sun went round the
earth. It took a huge cultural and intellectual shift for that to filter
into society – people were imprisoned or far worse just for daring to
question the orthodoxy. So that is very much at the heart of our piece,
and again, that comes from Haydn, that idea of Enlightenment.
Generally I’m an optimist but sometimes I look around – I work in
higher education a bit [Mark is Director of Composition at Royal
Holloway, University of London] – and I’m disheartened by the way that
society, through the government and universities in particular, is
channelling funds into scientific research that is deemed to be of
immediate economic benefit. I have scientist colleagues who really
struggle with this because having the time and space to think freely is
becoming more and more eroded.
So in some ways our piece is also a plea, really, to stop this
happening. That the only way we can find out more is to keep asking new
questions and being open. Since the Enlightenment we’ve made these
amazing discoveries, but I’d hate to see us moving backwards. I’m sure
we won’t, but we have to keep on. The Enlightenment was battling against
religious orthodoxy and now I feel we’re battling against the orthodoxy
of capitalism, actually. And that’s just as pernicious and perhaps even
more dangerous.
I agree. That whole neo-liberal emphasis on profit rather
than people, and how we all get sucked into consumerism, often despite
our best efforts.
Unfortunately universities are quite small institutions now in
relation to that thinking – it’s a David and Goliath situation. Whereas
somewhere like CERN has the clout not to be like that – it’s a really
inspirational place from that point of view, and feels very special.
The last movement of your piece is entitled ‘It is not
answers we seek’ … but questions. Which feels all about that quest for
knowledge.
That’s right; the last section is where that line, ‘the faithful
cannot search’ comes from – and also a lovely line: ‘thought to mine
thought, doubt to feed knowledge’. I think that’s brilliant; that we
think to mine new thoughts, and have to cultivate doubt in order to seek
new knowledge. The last section is a call to arms really. I’ve talked a
lot about CERN, but the piece is also about the emergence of life –
much more recent history! When Owen was writing this, his wife was
pregnant, so this was very much in his mind: every child that’s born has
to learn the history of knowledge anew. And it’s these new people who
will make the discoveries of the future.
Then we started thinking about how each new person is the result of a
star exploding. Everything in our bodies comes from supernova – which
is what Haydn observed through Herschel’s telescope. But it’s a really
difficult process. We have to teach every new generation what we
currently understand as the truth and at the same time try to instil the
idea that you mustn’t stick to that dogmatically.
Which is where critical thinking on the one hand and openness on the other are so important.
I think that applies as much to particle physics as to composing, or
any discipline. If we can maintain that culture, then I feel very
optimistic about the future, though it sometimes feels like there are
many obstacles.
Turning specifically to your piece, can I ask you what
listeners will encounter as the structure unfolds? From the score, it
looks to be in two parts, with each part having three continuous
sections.
Yes, the piece will last around 35 to 40 minutes – we haven’t
rehearsed it yet! Originally Owen and I had thought about making the
first part about the origin of matter and light, with the second part
being about the origin of life. That would have mirrored Haydn’s
structure in The Creation. But actually what ended up happening
was the intertwining of these two themes like a double helix structure
all the way through the piece. So the pause in the middle is more
practical really, for the chorus.
The ‘Intrada’ starts with that low sonority group of instruments I
mentioned. Then there’s a double-chorus tapestry of the verb ‘to be’ or
‘to begin’ in many languages; Owen was inspired by how international
CERN is – people come there from all over the world.
The first movement ‘proper’ is called ‘There is a Relic of Ancient
Light’. In this, the solo soprano alludes to the ‘cosmic background
microwave image’. This is a beautiful picture of the oldest light we can
see in the universe. Basically, the further away we see, the further
back in time we are looking, as light takes time to travel.
I gather that means some stars we see no longer actually exist!
That’s right. What we see today is how they were. This background
light is the afterglow of the Big Bang – the universe was only 380,000
years old. But we can’t see anything past that because, before then,
light and matter were the same thing, they weren’t separated! But
suddenly, as the universe cooled, just like ice turns to water at a
certain point, everything shifted and light became separated from
matter. So that’s the oldest light we can see – it’s still there, in the
sky! All we need is a good telescope. Full-sky map of the oldest light in the universe: Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team
That first section leads into a duo called ‘Imagine that Moment’.
Owen has composed two matching stanzas for the soloists. The soprano
imagines being at the very first instant of the Big Bang, beyond that
microwave radiation barrier where we can’t see. One of the big questions
is why was there more matter than antimatter at the beginning? Because
there ‘should’ have been equal amounts of each. But at CERN we learned
that for whatever reason, rather than ‘annihilating’ each other, there
was a bit of matter left over, which is everything that we see.
When I was at Hay I also went to a talk, by the biologist Adam
Rutherford, on the origins of life – the other major theme of my piece.
His beautiful book, Creation, discusses LUCA, or the Last
Universal Common Ancestor. Every living thing is descended from this –
every bacteria, every plant, every human being. So in this section, the
baritone imagines being at that point in the earth’s history, far later
than the birth of the universe, when something shifted and this thing
popped into existence.
So the two stanzas unfold concurrently. Owen and I saw lots of
parallels between these two switches – and it was a switch, when
something changed in the chemical make-up of the earth. There were huge
tides a hundred metres wide, and water rich in minerals; incredible
extremes of temperature, all swirling round, pulled by the moon, which
was much closer to the earth then. Suddenly it changed – as it did in
the early universe when suddenly something happened to instigate the Big
Bang. So we drew our own, totally unscientific parallels between these
two events. Maybe that makes us a bit anthropomorphic, but actually
human beings are amazing – for me, anyway; the idea that, in human
beings, the universe has made something that can study itself.
Yes, it’s quite a paradox! And picking up your point about
anthropomorphism, it’s interesting that, as the 19th century went on,
there were people who criticised Haydn’s Creation because of
the pictorial imagery he used; people who maintained that music should
be abstract, even transcendental, who thought it was wrong to try to
depict material substance in music.
The thing is, music is abstract, but almost every time a friend comes
to hear a new piece, they’ll ask, ‘was it about this’? Or they’ll say,
‘I heard this story’ in it. People always create images when they hear
music, whether they are specific images or abstract thoughts – even if
it’s nothing to do with what the composer was thinking about. And for
composers it’s a useful way of getting going! Sure, my piece is just
notes and rhythms – I don’t think my notes depict these ideas. But then
the piece isn’t just about sound! It’s about everything; text, context,
inspiration. They all come together.
Yes, to me, music is clearly abstract, but it’s also very
physical – quite apart from dealing with text, which you do here. At
least it is in performance; instruments are blown or bowed, or struck
and so on, and a live orchestra has its own visual element, even
theatre. It’s a visceral and emotional experience.
Absolutely! I do think there is something to be said for the idea of
the abstract in music. I’m thinking of Milton Babbitt perhaps [an
American serial composer and theorist, 1916-2011] – or even JS Bach’s
later pieces, like The Art of Fugue, where he wasn’t necessarily thinking which instruments would be playing.
No, he was just composing those lines.
They’re amazing pieces. And there’s some Babbitt that I absolutely
love. But it’s quite rare to create music in that way and I don’t think
we could only create music that way – it’s like a composer’s scientific
research! But you’re absolutely right; music, when it’s being performed,
is a happening. It’s a bit like dance, which I also work with a lot.
Whenever people watch dance – even if it’s the most abstract work, say, a
Merce Cunningham work, purely about form, content and movement – people
will still draw narratives and think of characters. It’s completely
normal. As humans we draw meaning from everything around us.
And we tell stories. Creation myths exist in every culture on earth.
Yes! So I have no problem with representation in music. Haydn even
uses it in his Prelude title: ‘The Representation of Chaos’. Then again,
with Holst and The Planets, I don’t think any of those
movements represent the planets as such. I think it’s far more
interesting to look at the Roman god aspect there, but also to think,
here’s a person in the early 20th century responding to the science of
the time – that’s just more interesting for me, rather than how this
represents that. But it’s very different for a poet, because that’s a
more representative art form.
Part 2 starts with a movement called ‘Theia’, and this movement is
both cosmological and biological. Theia is the name scientists give to
an early planet in the solar system that was on the same orbital path as
Earth. The theory is that the two collided with a devastating impact,
but one which led the way to our own existence.
Is that the ‘giant impact hypothesis’?
Yes that’s the name they give it – which I think at the moment is actually being questioned [laughs]. But then, Holst’s The Planets
doesn’t have Pluto in [it wasn’t discovered until 1930] – which is
probably a good thing, as Pluto’s now been demoted from a major planet
to a ‘dwarf’ planet!
But my piece is really about where knowledge is in my lifetime, so if
it turns out to be false, I still love the story: Theia collided with
the early earth, and the two cores merged together, whilst the debris
that resulted coalesced and became the moon. It’s hugely important
because it creates our tides, which led the way to life and it was then
much closer to the earth so it was basically like a big spoon, stirring
the earth up. That impact also knocked the earth off its axis, creating
the 23° tilt which gives us seasons, annual cyclic life patterns and so
on. This section, ‘Theia’, is where the title of the whole piece comes
from.
A Violence of Gifts. It’s very evocative.
The title is completely down to Owen. I love the text in this section
and it’s very short: ‘Theia/ a violence of gifts/ a moon, seasons,
tides/ a passing rage that set us adrift’.
You could equally apply that to matter-antimatter; it’s describing an
incredible violence of continuous creation and destruction, but, with
the gift, if you like, of imbalance leading to the stabilisation of
matter, which leads to life. It seems to me that violence, both
cosmological and geological, is at the root of all the creation events:
of the universe, the planets, of life. So ‘Theia’ is an important
movement. It encapsulates this very specific event but it’s a metaphor
for some of the other ideas in the piece too.
The next section is entitled ‘Once, to look out was enough’ – and the
baritone now has a solo. Thinking back to Haydn, he ruminates that, in
the past, all we thought was needed to understand our origins was to
look out into the cosmos, to understand stars and galaxies. But it turns
out that, just by looking, we can’t see everything. Actually what we
need to do is look inwards into matter – which is what they’re doing at
CERN: the Large Hadron Collider smashes particles together at the speed
of light so they come apart and, for a fraction of a moment, we can see
what’s inside them.
The baritone makes a direct reference to these experiments with the
words; ‘joust energy and matter/ and measure the curl/ to witness the
release/ of the forces and chains/ at the source of us’. But the
experiments are not just about looking inside atoms, they’re about
understanding the basic building blocks of everything. And, the more you
divide, you find there’s actually nothing there at all. There’s no
‘stuff’ – it’s just energy. Matter is a kind of illusion because of the
scale that we live on. Rather, at the root of everything we find four
forces of nature: gravity, the strong force, the weak force and the
electromagnetic force. The baritone goes on to sing about LUCA, or the
Last Universal Common Ancestor – so again, drawing the link between the
emergence of life and the beginning of the universe.
You’re talking about enormous extremes of scale here,
propelled by extraordinary physical forces. Does that inform any aspect
of your scoring, say?
When I was starting the piece, I wondered, will it start with a ‘big
bang’! Will I have huge things and tiny things to represent the scale?
But I just felt that, as powerful as the orchestra and chorus is, it’s
still just a few hundred people on stage, and to try and make direct
aural representations of these ideas wasn’t for me ever going to be
enough. So I haven’t really sought to do that. For me there is the
metaphor that these three notes, the C – G – Ab, are my quarks if you
like, the beginning. Just as, for Owen, words are his! So what I’ve
tried to do is think about the text and how to convey that.
Owen’s words are very pictorial, but are also very distilled
and abstract. He compresses them in a very fluid way – which sounds
contradictory, but necessary here perhaps?
Owen is one of the few people I would have trusted to do this because
he is a poet first and foremost. So he has that ability to distil
language, but he also writes plays and other works on a grander scale so
he understands the idea of narrative. Not that this is a narrative as
such, but we also wanted to get certain things in. I do say to my
students you shouldn’t choose your favourite poems and set them because
poetry doesn’t need music. But actually, Owen doesn’t call these poems,
although they are poetic.
And what you’ve done is very different from setting existing
poetry; you’ve commissioned the text specially and composed the piece
together in many ways – at least to start with. I guess to stick with
the genetic metaphor, there are your twin strands of creative DNA going
through the piece?
That’s right. We were sharing ideas really in the early stages, and
the piece was longer, originally – we shortened it. In no way did I
contribute to the text, but the whole process was collaborative. So I
don’t feel I just took his words and set them.
The last movement, ‘It is not answers we seek’ – here, there’s a
mixing together of those three ideas we’ve been discussing and it’s
scored for all the forces: one involves new text, about that need to
cultivate curiosity and doubt, and to avoid dogma. Another idea comes
through the chorus, which brings back some of the important themes of
the piece. For instance, they sing, ‘a weight on the side of us/ enough
to gift the cooling mass/ our chains of liberty’. This is a reference to
that idea of the imbalance of matter and antimatter. And thirdly, the
soprano and baritone allude to that idea about passing on the baton to
new generations, imploring all scientific and philosophical pioneers in
the future to keep asking questions and to keep ‘mining for new
thoughts’.
This all feels very timely, just as CERN are embarking on their second experiment with the Large Hadron Collider!
Yes, they’re hoping to research some more of what we can’t see, using
much higher energy levels this time. They’ll be partly hoping to
research dark matter and dark energy – which we don’t really touch on in
the piece, and is another, completely different story! It’s
tremendously exciting.
Here’s to ‘mining for new thoughts’ – and to new music. I’m looking forward to hearing it – best of luck for the rehearsals.
Thank you!
Mark was awarded a grant from the Jerwood Charitable Foundation to fund the commissioning of the text and the research trip to CERN.
Mark and Owen were selected as CERN Official Visiting Artists in the Arts@CERN programme for a specially curated visit.
Rebel: Les élémens – ‘Chaos’ Ravel: Piano Concerto in G major Milhaud: La creátion du monde Sibelius: Luonnotar Ginastera: Popol Vuh
Conductor – Stefan Asbury Soprano – Gweneth-Ann Jeffers Piano – Zhang Zuo
Leafing through the BBC National Orchestra of Wales’ large but dowdy
current season brochure, it would be easy to miss that several concerts
fall under a terrific series devised around the theme of creation.
Saturday April 18 saw the successful world premiere of Mark Bowden’s A Violence of Gifts.
This exciting and ambitious work, setting a taut, beautifully evocative
libretto by the poet Owen Sheers, explores the scientific origins of
light, matter and life. Alongside Holst’s The Planets, it was
performed with charged dynamism by the combined forces of the orchestra,
BBC National Chorus of Wales and soloists under conductor Martyn
Brabbins.
On May 8 – again, at St David’s Hall, conducted this time by Stephen
Layton – there will be a performance of the extraordinary sacred work
which inspired Bowden’s own creative impulse: Haydn’s oratorio, The Creation.
Sandwiched almost unnoticed in between these two, major events, was
an afternoon concert at BBC Hoddinott Hall on April 21, which offered an
enticing view of creation myths from Africa, Mesoamerica, Scandinavia
and Europe through the music of five composers spanning nearly 250
years. The opener could hardly have been more arresting than the
wonderful ‘Chaos’ by Rebel. Not the punk rock you might imagine, but
perhaps the baroque equivalent in the form of the first movement of
Jean-Féry Rebel’s ballet, Les élémens (1737) – his last work,
written with youthful vigour at the age of 70. Depicting the cosmic
chaos from which the elements of fire, water, air and earth arose, the
BBC NOW under Stefan Asbury tore into the opening chord – an
astoundingly dissonant cluster for the time – and surged with relish
through this audacious, stand-alone piece, which audiences of the day
happily embraced.
Fast forward to the 20th century, when a new generation of French
composers turned to African cultures and thence to black American jazz
in their search for fresh sounds and ideas. The works which resulted
were genuine in their homage – and socially progressive in their day.
But it is also worth noting the wider irony implicit in the zest for
so-called ‘primitivism’, which brought an oft-touted ‘exotic’ modernity
to western art through the adoption, and sometimes pillaging, of others’
ancient and living traditions.
Darius Milhaud was one of the most inventive composers to incorporate
jazz, polytonality and African-inspired rhythms within a strongly
individual, coolly neo-classical style. His La creátion du monde
of 1923 – like the Rebel and the Ginastera on this programme, also a
ballet – was to prove highly influential, despite being branded by
contemporary critics as ‘frivolous and more suitable for a restaurant or
a dance hall than for the concert hall’, as Milhaud later put it. A
pity, then, that Asbury’s interpretation had more clarity than
character, with the fine BBC NOW players only occasionally shaking loose
in this vibrant retelling of African creation folklore. Still, those
flashes at least pointed towards the Harlem insouciance and swagger with
which Milhaud interweaves a lyrical gravity and Stravinskian bite á la The Soldier’s Tale.
Clarity and rhythmic incision were also features of Ravel’s
later-composed Piano Concerto in G major (1929-31), performed before the
Milhaud on this occasion. But here, with the BBC NOW joined by the
brilliant young soloist, Zhang Zuo, the bluesy inflections were pure
delight, and buoyed by the ebullient orchestral colour for which Ravel
is justly famous. Perhaps the composer’s adoption of jazz later in life
was partly spurred by the rise of ‘Les six’, of which Milhaud was one,
and which threatened to render the elder composer outdated. Whatever
motivated his apparent style change, however, Ravel was sincere in
praising his far more prolific compatriot’s ‘vastness of conception’.
And audiences continue to be enthralled by this concerto’s dashing
virtuoso swirl; by its crisp American blues and crystalline outer
movements framing a languid paean to Basque and Iberian folk melody.
Zuo’s touch proved as deft as her technique was quickfire – if somewhat
lacking in depth at the Adagio assai. But this will doubtless
come, and the absence of sentimentality was refreshing – both from her
and from the orchestra, which matched her phrase for phrase and
sparkling solo for solo (the cor anglais of Sarah-Jayne Porsmoguer being
a highlight).
The soprano soloist in Sibelius’s Luonnotar (1913), the
redoubtable Gweneth-Ann Jeffers, had the more daunting task. It fell to
her to convey through a tremendously difficult vocal line – sung in
Finnish to boot – a strange and mysterious soundworld indeed. However,
despite some uncertainty at high-tessitura entries, she proved in richly
capable voice, amply supported by an orchestra whose Sibelius has grown
in confident suppleness under Principal Conductor Thomas Søndergård.
This short, breathtaking work – part-orchestral song, part-tone poem,
and composed between Sibelius’s groundbreaking 4th and 5th Symphonies –
hovers at the magical edge of tonality. Oscillating between shades of
light and dark, it relates with ethereal Nordic calm a creation story
from the epic Kalevala concerning the lonely daughter of nature named in the title.
Dramatic contrasts were writ large in the final work of this imaginative programme: the rarely heard Popol Vuh
(1982-3), or ‘People’s Book’ by the Argentinian composer, Alberto
Ginastera. From Finland we were transported to Guatemala for a musical
tale unfolding the sacred Mayan journey from pre-creation primal
darkness to the eventual ‘Dawn of Humankind’. Cast in eight sections,
Ginastera planned a ninth but died before he could finish it, leaving a
work of great beauty and explosive power which is nonetheless complete
in its own right.
Those who heard the Bowden on the 18th and admired his eloquent low
sonorities would doubtless have been struck anew by Ginastera’s vivid
use of subterranean brass and woodwind. The Argentine’s orchestral
palette is dazzling, and such colour, coupled with an expressive range
from sepulchral calm to pounding brutality, makes for a visceral live
experience. Here, Asbury and orchestra delivered the highlight of the
afternoon with a performance of great spirit and virtuosity.*
Yes, Popol Vuh wears its Stravinsky and Bartók influences on its sleeve – and I was reminded in some chamber sections of Roberto Gerhard’s Libra
and other of the Catalan’s works. But originality is vastly overrated
as a virtue it seems to me. If a piece works on its own terms as this
one so joyously does, then who cares? From glissando timpani to ghostly
strings and unbridled fanfares, with evocative rain-like effects
balancing pizzicato against plocking percussion, this piece contains
treasure that deserves to be shared more often.
* Asbury has recorded this work on Neos with the WDR
Sinfonieorchester Köln. Why not investigate too a more avant-garde
approach to creation mythology, and an actual setting of words from the Popol Vuh: the mighty Ecuatorial by Edgar Varèse (1933).
Concert performance by the Welsh National Opera Orchestra Conducted by Lothar Koenigs Brünnhilde: Iréne Theorin Wotan: Bryn Terfel Sieglinde: Rachel Nicholls Valkyries: Camilla Roberts / Meeta Ravel / Leah-Marian Jones /
Madeline Shaw / Katherine Broderick / Ceri Williams / Emma Carrington /
Sarah Pring
While the eyes of the opera world were on the International Opera
Awards at the London Savoy on April 27, a packed audience at Cardiff’s
Wales Millennium Centre, celebrating the venue’s 10th anniversary,
witnessed one of this year’s finalists in splendid action. Conductor
Lothar Koenigs has been acclaimed for his performances of Wagner at
Welsh National Opera, where he has been music director since the 2009/10
season; Die Meistersinger (as here with Bryn Terfel) and Lohengrin have been notable successes at WNO amongst others he has conducted around the world. This concert performance of Die Walküre Act III, with a fantastic cast of eleven singers and beautifully responsive WNO Orchestra, showed that a full-blown Ring cycle is bursting within him.
It was an electrifying performance from the assembled forces, and one
which needed no staging to convey the intense emotional drama and
multilayered symbolism redolent in Wagner’s every phrase. To hear a
single act plucked from this seminal, revolutionary epic – totalling
some fifteen hours across four operas – is unbearably tantalising, and
yet yielding of enormous riches. At least, it proved so here with the
world-class leads and robustly-matched support enlisted by the WMC in
their first joint presentation with resident company WNO.
Bryn Terfel needs no introduction to audiences in Wales, but for some
in Cardiff, this will have been their first encounter with his
globally-renowned portrayal of Wotan, chief of the gods. In superb
voice, Terfel embodied with every musical and physical gesture this
towering and complex character, whose unresolveable, often self-made
dilemmas lie at the heart of the entire Ring. Die Walküre
is the second opera of the cycle.* It is here that the greater wisdom
of Wotan’s favourite child, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, induces her to
disobey him, thereby setting in train a (further) sequence of events
which will lead inexorably to the passing of the gods, and to a new,
albeit no less problematic, age of humanity at the finale of the fourth
opera, Götterdämerung.
Wotan’s avenging power and fury were palpable even before Terfel
strode onto the stage, as the eight Valkyrie – to a woman, richly
sonorous and riding the wings of that famous, thrilling orchestral
introduction – contemplated their sister’s ‘treason’ with frightened
dismay. Rachel Nicholls made a brief but notable mark as the rescued
Sieglinde, pregnant with the hero of the future. Her noble saviour,
Brünnhilde, was performed with wonderful, increasing dramatic intensity
by the Swedish soprano, Iréne Theorin.
Rising to the literal and metaphorical challenge of an on-form
Terfel, with his huge presence and subtle vocal command, is a big ask of
any soprano cast alongside him in this role, and the tessitura in Die Walküre
seems often to dwell in the mezzo end of the range. But Theorin’s
Brünnhilde proved, if not entirely Terfel’s expressive equal, no less
defiant and vulnerable than her troubled father, and her singing at ‘War
es so schmählich’ (‘Was I so shameful’) was eloquently convincing. Thus
Wotan’s rage is softened to the point where he is able to ruefully
acknowledge the correctness of her insight, and to confess his own
self-lacerating desire ‘to put an end to my sorrow in the ruins of my
world’. The one-eyed god may indeed be king but, it seems, not all his
subjects are quite so wilfully blind.
Alas, Brünnhilde must pay, if not for her insight, then for her
actions in defending Siegmund. Whilst her punishment is lessened as her
pleas for leniency strike home, the cost is unspeakably poignant for
father and daughter alike, who must part forever; a cost which was
searingly portrayed by the leads and orchestra together in this
breathtaking rendition of their leave-taking.** The kiss with which
Wotan sends Brünnhilde into deep slumber, simultaneously sealing both
the ‘curse’ of her demotion to mortal and the ‘blessing’ of her future
awakening (they both know) by the hero Siegfried, was heartrending in
its tenderness and dramatic import – as was Terfel’s achingly-wrought
farewell, ‘Leb wohl’. Illustration of Lothar Koenigs by Dean Lewis
Here
especially, and in the ensuing regathered surge of the ‘Magic Fire
Music’, Koenigs’ orchestra successfully took on the musical likeness of a
Greek chorus in becoming, to all intents and purposes, a character or
characters in its own right; one of many radical elements traceable to
ancient times which Wagner wove so ardently within his progressive
(re)envisioning of theatrical past and future. The delivery from the
orchestra was not always collectively sublime, but events and inner
states were often exquisitely drawn section by section and moment by
moment – and, as so often in Wagner’s way, with deliberately varying
degrees of subtlety before even the characters themselves register them
within the unfolding of the plot. Pacing, of course, is crucial in this
regard, and Koenigs’ sensitive direction revealed a clear, symphonic
structure. The strings were shimmering and forceful by turn and the
brass were supportive, yet crisply articulate. Of the woodwind, Daniel
Rye’s bass clarinet stood out in conveying the tragedy of Brünnhilde’s
lonely isolation and, by extension, that of her doomed father.
Wotan must overcome his despair with renewed determination in order
to summon the fire god Loge and encircle Brünnhilde’s mountain with
protective flame. Ultimately, of course, fire will consume Valhalla –
and before that Brünnhilde too in her final act of selfless redemption.
Here, the combination of Terfel’s coiled, intense passion and the
red-lit, fiery backdrop encircling the orchestra on stage were all the
visual clues necessary to the compelling drama being enacted – and
projecting forward to the two operas to come within Wagner’s great
cycle. Altogether, it was a wholly unforgettable evening.
* Or Day One following the Vorabend or ‘ante-evening’ of Das Rheingold. Wagner referred to the the whole as a Bühnenfestspiel, or stage festival play.
** Verdi, of course, is rightly renowned for his intense, complex father-daughter relationships but Act III of Die Walküre
– without even considering the deep-lying mytho/philosophical strata of
the piece – contains one of the most emotionally frank such portrayals
in all of opera. This year also sees Bryn Terfel celebrate his 50th birthday, and
25 years in the business. The bass-baritone will be giving a special
concert performance at the WMC, of which he is a longstanding supporter,
details to be announced.
