ROH - George Benjamin: Lessons in Love and Violence

[Darkbloom]

Are you familiar with the operas of the late Robert Ashley (1930-2014)? Among his many operas, not even Quicksand (which is also a novel), gets even close to the "stage play set to music" model.

No, I'm not familiar with them but it sounds like I ought to be. I couldn't agree more with the comment earlier about 'opera' being exhausted as a form. It leads to a lot of boring music where 30 minutes of material gets spread over several hours. The fusion of music and drama will never die as a form, obviously, but opera was always a freakish concept that only a few people have ever really been able to exploit satisfactorily anyway. I still remember the boredom of Sophie's Choice at the ROH, which sums up the futility of modern opera for me. Thanks for the recommendation, it sounds interesting.

[Bryn]

No, I'm not familiar with them but it sounds like I ought to be. I couldn't agree more with the comment earlier about 'opera' being exhausted as a form. It leads to a lot of boring music where 30 minutes of material gets spread over several hours. The fusion of music and drama will never die as a form, obviously, but opera was always a freakish concept that only a few people have ever really been able to exploit satisfactorily anyway. I still remember the boredom of Sophie's Choice at the ROH, which sums up the futility of modern opera for me. Thanks for the recommendation, it sounds interesting.

I would suggest you start with Perfect Lives, from the days when Channel 4 still did things like jointly commissioning operas for TV. There are 5 parts, all of which, I think, are available on YouTube and DVD:

There are at least five of the later operas to be found on YouTube or Vimeo. However, I think it is only Perfect Lives and QUICKSAND which are available in high definition. That said, the video and audio quality of the non-HD items is still more than merely acceptable.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

...and people may want to have a look at this if they haven't already:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bp1t3v/imagine-2018-george-benjamin-what-do-you-want-to-do-when-you-grow-up

Shown on 16th Oct thus still on i-player.

In celebration of GB's 60th birthday on Wednesday, this documentary was repeated last night on BBC4 at 10:50:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bp1t3v/imagine-2018-george-benjamin-what-do-you-want-to-do-when-you-grow-up

[Master Jacques]

I'm inclined to think that "opera" as such, that is to say works native to the resources of an opera house, is an exhausted form. Contemporary works in that general area tend to interest me in proportion to the way they seem to want to break out of its restrictions. I can't imagine that anything by George Benjamin is going to come into that category, but maybe I'm wrong.

A rich comment indeed. I would say that although lyric theatre can never be exhausted, putting prestigious dinosaurs on "main house" stages for a handful of performances is something which has had its day. Composers spend years writing the things, and then a few days later it's all forgotten.

Benjamin's big operas are written as if the 20th century - let alone the 21st - had never happened. Quite aside from their manifold inadequacies in other areas, they move at the glacial pace of Lohengrin (and with comparable dramaturgy) in a way which alienates modern audiences, and indeed anyone who thinks or cares about theatre at all. Turnage is another composer who hasn't got beyond Verdi in his idea of how opera should "go" in the here-and-now. Fortunately there are others who are still mining lyric theatre to great effect - but rarely, alas, on those outmoded "big stages".

[Keith]

A rich comment indeed. I would say that although lyric theatre can never be exhausted, putting prestigious dinosaurs on "main house" stages for a handful of performances is something which has had its day. Composers spend years writing the things, and then a few days later it's all forgotten.

Benjamin's big operas are written as if the 20th century - let alone the 21st - had never happened. Quite aside from their manifold inadequacies in other areas, they move at the glacial pace of Lohengrin (and with comparable dramaturgy) in a way which alienates modern audiences, and indeed anyone who thinks or cares about theatre at all. Turnage is another composer who hasn't got beyond Verdi in his idea of how opera should "go" in the here-and-now. Fortunately there are others who are still mining lyric theatre to great effect - but rarely, alas, on those outmoded "big stages".

I think that's a little unfair to Benjamin whose works are a bit of step up from those of Turnage and the aesthetic of the "well-made" stage play set to music. I'm not a huge fan but there is something a bit more distinct going on because of the close collaboration with an original librettist (Martin Crimp) and a particular director (Katie Mitchell) which stamps them with a different sensibility that seems all of a piece. Whilst his texts for Benjamin aren't as formally original as something like "Attempts on her Life", they are complex and resonant constructions and for me the "glacial pace" is alienating in a constructive sense, part of the dramatic impact of the work and its ultimately unsettling nature. I enjoyed "Lessons" particularly as a piece of original theatre, less so as opera, for I don't think Benjamin and Crimp have quite got a handle yet on what opera can do best which is to stage simultaneity, different characters thinking/feeling different things at the same moment or the presentation of different actions/scenes, whilst held in a holding (musical) form. But I don't know many composers who can do that, although I think Berio could. Berio also had the advantage of working with major literary collaborators and its here I wish composers would be more bold in marrying music to a more complex literary form.

[Master Jacques]

I think that's a little unfair to Benjamin whose works are a bit of step up from those of Turnage and the aesthetic of the "well-made" stage play set to music. I'm not a huge fan but there is something a bit more distinct going on because of the close collaboration with an original librettist (Martin Crimp) and a particular director (Deborah Warner?) which stamps them with a different sensibility. Whilst his texts for Benjamin aren't as formally original as something like "Attempts on her Life", they are complex and resonant constructions and for me the "glacial pace" is alienating in a constructive sense, part of the dramatic impact of the work and its ultimately unsettling nature. I enjoyed "Lessons" particularly as a piece of original theatre, less so as opera, for I don't think Benjamin and Crimp have quite got a handle yet on what opera can do best which is to stage simultaneity, different characters thinking/feeling different things at the same moment or the presentation of different actions/scenes, whilst held in a holding (musical) form. But I don't know many composers who can do that, although I think Berio could. Berio also had the advantage of working with major literary collaborators and its here I wish composers would be more bold in marrying music to a more complex literary form.

I'm not gunning for Benjamin, who is a good (minor) composer, when he sticks to what he can do well.

For me, Martin Crimp is the main problem - or has been in all three of his major collaborations with GB. Irrespective of whether we agree with them or not (which I don't) his texts are poetic tracts, not really suitable for the stage or drama. You put your finger on why, I think, which amounts to Crimp's failure to grasp the need for ambiguity (i.e. sympathetic understanding for all the characters, not just the PC ones). Benjamin's failure is understandable, as he can't turn Crimp's moralistic puppets into characters - though a better stage composer could (as you suggest) have given more satisfying musical form to these operas, which come across as random, rambling patchworks, thus at the same time (paradoxically) intellectually pretentious yet vacuous. So this "Crimping" of mainstream opera is entirely regrettable, in my opinion.

[Keith]

I think we're going to have to disagree on the quality of Crimp's texts, particularly for "Lessons" which for me did have a complexity that seemed far from moralistic where the repetitions of political, emotional and physical violence suggested to me the absence of a clear moral standpoint based on one character. I was troubled by some aspects, particularly what felt to me like a latent misogyny in the attitude to the Queen Isabella figure, something shared with another adaptation of the source material in Marlowe's Edward II, Jarman's film version, although it's a misogyny, not (I think) in the Marlowe itself.

[Master Jacques]

I think we're going to have to disagree on the quality of Crimp's texts, particularly for "Lessons" which for me did have a complexity that seemed far from moralistic where the repetitions of political, emotional and physical violence suggested to me the absence of a clear moral standpoint based on one character.

For me, the complexity of Written on Skin was of a cerebral-poetic kind ill suited to musical treatment, and I found plenty in it which seemed there for linguistic show rather than meaning. The standpoint there seemed to me penny-and-slot moralistic throughout, with no space left to give any arguments to the first character (the husband). And don't you think there's something non-functional about a text in which the third character (the boy) is baked in a pie to be eaten by the second (the wife), without eliciting anything other than a mild, musico-dramatic "so what?" As the characters were ciphers, the demise of one of them raised neither horror nor any other strong emotion.

Lessons... was less linear in that regard, I agree: though the writer's lack of engagement with anyone in the dramatic personae (except the mercifully silent daughter, who rather ran away with the show, in my opinion, not having any Crimpisms to cope with!) cut against any feeling of involvement here either. Just between ourselves, I was glad at least that Hannigan was not given carte blanche to be the "tragic victim" this time round, as Isabella was up there with the nastiest of them - I gather from what the singer has said since, though, that she found the character's lack of moral rectitude a challenge, and that she won't be playing the part again.

I am with you on finding a critical attitude to Isabella in Jarman (clearly a source for Crimp in several ways) which is absent from Marlowe, in which she is pretty much a simple "victim" with no agency. At least Crimp and Jarman gave her that agency, whether or not we feel uncomfortable about any possible misogyny that goes along with the gift. Or should we agree with Hannigan, in wanting an Isabella whose vicious moles were all caused by the men in her life rather than by nature?