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What direction is contemporary opera moving in? According to 2011's new-opera festivals: every direction possible.
This summer, East and West London went head-to-head, fighting to bring opera into a new array of styles and subjects. Hammersmith's Tête à Tête festival earned it's boast as the ‘most imaginative laboratory for new opera’, presenting a diverse patchwork of finished productions alongside works in progress. Meanwhile, the 5th Grimeborn Festival ran in East London's gritty Dalston; a series of innovative operas and musical theatre pieces staged in the squat-chic Arcola Theatre.
Both festivals blurred the boundaries of traditional styles, forming operatic hybrids from movement-theatre, street entertainment, live electronics and performance-art. Themes ranged from traditional subjects (Greek mythology and Austen novels) to today's politics (ecological and middle-eastern issues) to the macabre and downright bizarre (drunk artists, sexualised nursery rhymes and the story of Ziggy, a cabaret-singing aborted foetus). Here is an overview of the works likely to remain with us for longer than one season:
Grimeborn launched with the London premiere of Jonathan Dove's new take on the Austen classic, Mansfield Park. 'When I first read Mansfield Park, over twenty years ago, I heard music' Dove claims; the appeal being to give expression to the quiet sufferings of the heroine, Fanny Price. The libretto, by Alasdair Middleton, distills Austen's story, making the Cinderella aspect its kernel. Herritage Opera commissioned the work, to add to their repertoire of chamber operas they perform at stately homes around England, using only a piano for accompaniment – an appropriate medium to set a 19th Century classic. Musically, Dove wanted to write something which was not bound by the stylistic procedures of the period, but would be recognisable and appropriate to the era. The result is an attractive and engaging work, which is reserved yet not lifeless; which manages to capture the charm of the period without becoming too chocolate-boxy. Dove's melodies for his characters are memorable, although at times the work could have benefited from more changes of key and harmony to move the action forward and prevent a feeling of stasis.
The 'traditional with a twist' idea was echoed elsewhere in the festival; Barefoot Opera reinvented Handel's Alcina for the Grimeborn, presenting it as a stripped-down version which kept the original melodies of the arias but accompanied them with just a clarinet and a harpsichord, adding an english narrator, folk interludes and pieces of movement theatre.
Other librettists, meanwhile, ventured into uncharted areas. With subject matter influenced by the recent successes of quirky opera-biogs, such as Anna Nicole, Steven Crowe's The Francis Bacon Opera, presents a humorous yet intelligent look at the life of the 20th Century's most revered painter. Staged inside a irregularly-shaped yellow scaffold – a motif featured in many of Bacon's paintings – the work uses an exact transcription from the 1985 Melvyn Bragg interview, which won awards for it's brutal honesty and controversial subject matter. Musically, we can see the attraction of Bacon and Bragg to the composer; Bacon's philosophical spiels about art and beauty were stretched into long luxurious melody lines, whilst the intonation of Bragg's questioning grew ever more ridiculous and high-pitched as he steadily grew more drunk.
The decadent and the absurd provided a recurrent theme, particularly for Tête à Tête, where the Jerwood Opera Writing Programme protégés Luke Styles and Peter Cant premiered the first scene of their unfinished work A Fetus in America, which breaks stylistic boundaries, bringing together drag, musical satire and cabaret to critique pro-life issues and American politics.
However, the most innovative material of the festivals – two Tête à Tête works that are clearly holding the torch for the future of new opera – were SizeZero Opera's The Boy Who Lived Down the Lane and Frances M Lynch's collaboration with Alejandro Viñao: Baghdad Monologue.
The Boy Who Lived Down the Lane was a short but truly outstanding work by Singaporean composer Diana Soh, which told a story of Jack and Jill in sexual pursuit of one another through a cut-and-paste libretto made entirely from snippets of nursery rhymes (James Currie). Dressed in a baby-doll dress the lead soprano and founder of the company, Laura Bowler, hurled herself through a series of schizophrenic ramblings, lending a sexual element to the originally innocent text. The score's rhythms were neat and articulate, its pace was fast and its material was fresh. However, its real innovation lay in the way that it combined different tonalities – simple, childlike, melodies in a major key against dissonant chords and obscure timbres – to achieve the effect of distorted innocence.
Baghdad Monologue was a work for a solo performer and live electronics which commented on the middle-eastern intervention, inspired by Eliot Weinberger's book What I Heard About Iraq. It was constructed from small soundbites, some abstract noise, others obvious references to everyday life: the call to prayer, George Bush's voice; the innocent sound of children playing. These were blended into Lynch's voice, used to punctuate it; they faded in, out, were sometimes distorted or bled into one another to create an exquisite patchwork of politically-charged aural meanings.
What united both works in their success was music's central and irreplaceable role. Whereas with Dove's Mansfield Park, or Crowe's Francis Bacon the music adds to the libretto, these works are entirely reliant on their medium in order to even make sense. The Boy Who Lived Down the Lane depends on it's music for its sense of befouled innocence; Baghdad Monologue depends music to refer to different cultures. If we want to see contemporary opera continue to flourish, then undoubtedly, this 'gestalt' approach is its foremost champion.
