{"id":90274,"date":"2015-09-25T17:13:05","date_gmt":"2015-09-25T21:13:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=90274"},"modified":"2015-09-25T17:13:05","modified_gmt":"2015-09-25T21:13:05","slug":"new-myths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/25\/new-myths\/","title":{"rendered":"New Myths"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sir Harrison Birtwistle and David Harsent\u2019s operas breathe life into\u00a0old stories with new perspectives.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"

Elizabeth Atherton and Mark Padmore in The Corridor<\/i> at Aldeburgh Festival. \u00a9 Aldeburgh Music. Photo by Clive Barda<\/p><\/div>\n

Opera can sometimes be a gory feast: Strauss\u2019s Salome kisses a severed head before being slain by Herod\u2019s soldiers, Britten\u2019s Peter Grimes drowns at sea after being chased by an angry mob, Tippett\u2019s King Priam is murdered after his entire family has either abandoned him or perished, while Puccini\u2019s Tosca leaps to her doom after her lover is shot by a firing squad. All that violence is usually the bloody result of a quest for love and liberty. Indeed, as Sir Harrison Birtwistle<\/a> and David H<\/a>arsent\u2019s<\/a> latest chamber opera,\u00a0The Cure<\/em>, demonstrates, the moments we think will be our happiest often turn into our most tragic.<\/p>\n

In The Cure<\/em>, Jason and Medea have returned to Iolcos with the golden fleece so that Jason can finally reclaim his throne. But Jason\u2019s father, Aeson, is on the verge of dying, and so Jason asks Medea the witch for yet another favor\u2014as though killing her own brother to help Jason escape from Colchis hadn\u2019t been enough. \u201cI will give you children,\u201d he says, \u201cGive Aeson back his youth.\u201d Not because Jason loves his father, but because he wants the old man to celebrate his triumph and \u201csing and dance with us.\u201d It doesn\u2019t get more egotistical than that. Nobody asks the old king whether he wants to drink from the fountain of youth; they simply force it down his throat:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

AESON
<\/u>(angry and perturbed<\/em>)
What you\u2019ve made of me is what I must become.
More chance of sadness; more chance of loss;
another trudge into old age, waiting
for my sight to fail, my hearing to fail, my body to weaken \u2026
I had lived my life. Now I have time back I am lost in time;
I must live my past again as another man.<\/p>\n

I could smell death: something of richness in it
I could see death: vast and shadowless
I could hear death: voices drifting to silence.<\/p>\n

My last thought before sleeping
My first thought on waking:
Death death death death death<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Harsent has a knack for exploding human certainties, in this instance the assumption that we\u2019d all like to be young forever; his Aeson knows that life is worth losing, but must nonetheless endure his son and daughter-in-law as they keep him alive purely to suit their own purposes. A supremely gifted librettist, Harsent understands that \u201cthe gods punish hubris<\/a>\u201d and that \u201ceveryone is guilty<\/a>\u201d, but that the trick lies in picking a specific moment and mood in a story to slide the spectator into the heart of these dilemmas. It\u2019s the composer\u2019s duty to sustain that mood, and there\u2019s a wonderful section ten minutes into the opera where Medea calls out the names of the \u201cherbs that harm to cure\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

Horehound\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 sysmera\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 woundwort
sanicle \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 lupine \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 saxifrage<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Birtwistle\u2019s score, with its hypnotic, repetitious use of the E note, perfectly frames the words with its bold, sharp contours, ensuring the violin, viola and cello don\u2019t drown the voices. In the end, Aeson\u2019s youth is restored, but he storms off after violently kissing Medea, throwing her to the ground when he\u2019s done with her: hardly the reward she\u2019d been expecting. Further complicating matters, Aeson and Jason are now almost indistinguishable\u2014a visual element reinforced by the fact the tenor Mark Padmore plays both roles\u2014shaking the foundation of Medea\u2019s love for Jason and signaling the birth of her new-found independence.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0New York Times<\/em> has called the Harsent-Birtwistle team\u2014whose collaboration began with Gawain<\/em> (1991) and continued with The Woman and the Hare<\/em> (1999), The Ring Dance of the Nazarene<\/em> (2003), The Minotaur<\/em> (2008), The Corridor<\/em> (2009), Songs from the Same Earth<\/em> (2012), and now The Cure<\/em>\u2014\u201can alchemically potent pairing<\/a>,\u201d and while Harsent has pointed out that \u201copera is about the music; few people speak of Da Ponte\u2019s Don Giovanni<\/em> or Piave\u2019s La Traviata<\/em><\/a>,\u201d I\u2019d like to see anyone argue that Mozart\u2019s greatest operas\u2014The Marriage of Figaro<\/em>, Don Giovanni<\/em> and Cos\u00ec fan tutte<\/em>\u2014weren\u2019t also achieved thanks to Lorenzo Da Ponte\u2019s vast talents. After all, Da Ponte was so sought after that most composers in Vienna fought over him. Harsent, arguably Britain\u2019s greatest living poet, is nearing the end of what\u2019s been an amazingly fertile decade, which began with the Forward Prize-winning Legion<\/a><\/em>, a sequence of poetic dispatches from the various parts of our war-torn world, and concluded with Fire Songs<\/a><\/em>, which is dedicated to Birtwistle. It\u2019s a sequence of hallucinatory reflections on how our world might end: \u201cMy children\u2019s children will stand outside the law, to wreck \/ and break, to witness, to set fires, to fall on the weak.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Elizabeth Atherton in The Cure<\/em> at Aldeburgh Festival. \u00a9 Aldeburgh Music. Photo by Clive Barda<\/p><\/div>\n

The Cure<\/em>, which debuted this summer, is a companion piece to The Corridor<\/em>, which was revived so it could be performed back-to-back with its younger sibling. Its setting is the liminal moment in the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, when Orpheus turns to look at his beloved just as she\u2019s a couple of paces shy of returning to the world of the living.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, the Orpheus myth is one of the most patronizing to women: it\u2019s all about his<\/em> pain, his<\/em> misfortune, his<\/em> attempt to rescue her, his<\/em> lyre, while Eurydice has instead usually stood around like a prop. No longer. Alison Chitty\u2019s set for The Corridor<\/em> should be commended for visually balancing the story in Eurydice\u2019s favor, allowing her far more room to roam than her impatient lover: Orpheus stands on one side of a doorframe, standing atop a square of bright, almost uninviting green, with Eurydice on the other, surrounded (and dressed in) a soothing slate gray. The lighting also has the effect of making Orpheus\u2019s side of the world seem far more inhospitable than the world of the dead, making the green glow like ectoplasm rather than soft, welcoming grass.<\/p>\n

The beginning is bold but simple, the quasi-monosyllabic dialogue punctuated by Birtwistle\u2019s staccato notes, especially around the word light<\/em>, as the couple makes its way back to the world of the living. By the time Eurydice reaches the far end of the aisle, she staggers and an argument ensues. Trumping convention, Birtwistle and Harsent restore her dimensions, giving her a cutting rebuttal to every one of Orpheus\u2019s lines:<\/p>\n

\n

WOMAN
\u2014you looked back because\u2014<\/p>\n

MAN
\u2014because you seemed to be already there\u2014<\/p>\n

WOMAN
\u2014because the moment seemed more yours than mine\u2014<\/p>\n

MAN
\u2014because I felt you step into the light\u2014<\/p>\n

WOMAN
\u2014because you felt I\u2019d be there as I should\u2014<\/p>\n

MAN
\u2014because love brought me round\u2014<\/p>\n

WOMAN
\u2014because you thought love owed you everything\u2014<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Harsent and Birtwistle make Eurydice the real star. Like Aeson, she was never desperate to be rescued, or at least didn\u2019t think of it as such an uncomplicated proposition. She\u2019s no damsel in distress. Actually, she seems quite at home in the underworld. Orpheus may sing, but Eurydice makes sense<\/em>. For instance, this following passage is in a kind of sprechgesang<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

Suppose he\u2019d brought me out; imagine that\u2014
the blaze of noon, unbearable, the wind
sour in my nostrils, grass like flint underfoot,
his spittle stinging my lip,
a tangle of voices, urgent, meaningless,
my true language the soft
hints and gentle laughter of the dead.<\/p>\n

In life he loved me; in death he loved me more\u2014
my second life his gift to both of us;
my second death to be mine and mine alone.<\/p>\n

What did he want from me?\u2014My love his due,
my return to the world of light his masterstroke.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Eurydice knows her lyre-wielding lover is doomed: \u201chis grief will become his token, his name \/ another word for loss: all he\u2019s remembered by,\u201d she says, knowing Orpheus is doomed to be ripped apart by the maenads, Dionysus\u2019s mad, lustful acolytes. We all know how the story ends: Orpheus loses his nerve an inch shy of victory, turns, and thus loses her forever. Here is the end of Orpheus\u2019s song:<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There\u2019s only one word
dark enough, one word as bleak, as cruel,
as blighted, as unnatural, one word
to uproot the tongue, to deafen, to break bones,
to tear the heart, a word to blacken rain,
to rot fruit on the bough, to poison streams,
to still the child in the womb, to bring to ruin
all joy or gift or courage or hope or love\u2014
Eurydice \u2026 Eurydice \u2026 Eurydice \u2026 Eurydice…<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Andr\u00e9 Naffis-Sahely\u2019s poetry was most recently featured in <\/em>The Best British Poetry 2014.\u00a0His latest translation is <\/em>The Physiology of the Employee by\u00a0Honor\u00e9 de Balzac.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sir Harrison Birtwistle and David Harsent\u2019s operas breathe life into\u00a0old stories with new perspectives. Opera can sometimes be a gory feast: Strauss\u2019s Salome kisses a severed head before being slain by Herod\u2019s soldiers, Britten\u2019s Peter Grimes drowns at sea after being chased by an angry mob, Tippett\u2019s King Priam is murdered after his entire family […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":789,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[19564,19561,19563,2204,19562,19565,19566],"class_list":["post-90274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-david-harsent","tag-eurydice","tag-harrison-birtwistle","tag-opera","tag-orpheus","tag-the-corridor","tag-the-cure"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBirtwistle and Harsent\u2019s Operas Turn Myths on Their Heads<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 25, 2015 \u2013 Sir Harrison Birtwistle and David Harsent\u2019s operas 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