The composer’s latest examines sex, power, violence and the dangerous allure of music
ALL-ACTION and surround-sound, opera was the 19th-century equivalent of cinema—and, some say, is now obsolete in an era of higher-tech entertainment. The suggestion that it might be outmoded draws a furious response from George Benjamin (pictured). “It’s the most thrilling and immediate form,” says the British composer, one of the few anywhere to be producing new operas that win both critical acclaim and wide audiences. “How could the art of setting stories to music ever become irrelevant?”
Striking, then, that his operas dwell in the remote past. His latest, “Lessons in Love and Violence”, premiered at the Royal Opera House in London on May 10th. In it, he and Martin Crimp, his librettist, retell the story of Edward II, a 14th-century English king, and his supposed lover Piers Gaveston. Their previous collaboration, “Written on Skin”, revisited an obscure Provençal tale of cannibalistic sexual possession.
This is dark material, but Mr Benjamin himself, now 58, retains a youthful idealism in his approach to his art. He was extremely youthful when he came to prominence: at 20 he had an orchestral piece performed in London’s venerable Proms. At 16 he began commuting to Paris to study with Olivier Messiaen, who compared him to Mozart. Pierre Boulez was another big influence. He is a defiant apologist for the drily theoretical work that Boulez and his acolytes produced in the 1960s. “After the catastrophe of the second world war,” Mr Benjamin says, these composers “embarked on an extraordinary journey of the mind and ear. The resulting music was not very lovable, but it wasn’t written to be loved.”
His own oeuvre is characterised by a pared-down economy and wizardry with unusual instruments, such as, in “Lessons in Love and Violence”, the cimbalom. (He was once helped out of a creative block by Hindustani music.) Like “Written on Skin”, “Lessons” has no interval or chorus. Nor does it have the sort of melodic tunes many casual listeners might expect in opera. Mr Benjamin thinks that “self-sealed tunes may stop the drama, which should be continuously evolving from start to finish.”
In “Lessons”, the drama hurtles from tenderness to savagery. The fierce modernism is offset by arresting tableaux. Famished subjects rail against their country’s misrule. In a pivotal duet after Gaveston’s demise, the queen tries to woo back the king; he rebuffs her and, still mourning his lover, unwittingly seals his own fate.
The potential of youth and the power of music—the leitmotifs of Mr Benjamin’s career—are among the opera’s central themes, along with sex, politics, violence and the relationship between them. The king’s children are witnesses, then accomplices, then something worse. For all Mr Benjamin’s faith in it, music is a sinister force too, at first a sign of decadence, then an instrument of power. “The moment someone stands up in front of an orchestra”, the composer says, “it’s immediately a ritual.” The result is “something magic” which “can be lyrical, but if the story is dark, it may demand the opposite to lyricism.”