"Illuminated"
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, March 25, 2013.
The raw musical talent of the English composer George Benjamin
has never been in doubt. In 1976, when
he was sixteen, he went to Paris to study
with the august Olivier Messiaen, who
compared him to Mozart. By the age of
twenty, he was receiving ovations at the
Proms, in London’s Royal Albert Hall.
Such early acclaim might have bred arrogance in some artists, but in the case
of Benjamin, a congenial and unassuming man, it seemed to have the opposite
effect, engendering caution. Between
the ages of twenty and fifty, he worked
with conspicuous slowness, often spending years on a fifteen- or twenty-minute
piece. The adjectives “exquisite,” “fastidious,” and “immaculate” followed
him around in the press, leaving the impression that he was a miniaturist, a creator of musical jewel boxes, rather than
the kind of composer who could shake
you to the core.
Benjamin’s first large-scale opera,
“Written on Skin,” which had its première last summer, at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, and is now playing at
the Royal Opera House, in Covent
Garden, demolishes that image. The
craftsmanship remains: more than a
few pages of “Written on Skin” are as
immaculate as anything that Benjamin
has written, or, for that matter, anything
composed since the heyday of Ravel.
The score is magnificently free of clichés
and longueurs. Orchestration teachers
will add it to the curriculum, and students will marvel at the mind that could
blend oboes, muted trumpets, pizzicato
strings, and bongos into one scuttling,
insectoid instrument. Yet the opera
smolders with darker, wilder energies.
Benjamin has found a way of painting
on a large canvas, indulging in grand
gestures while maintaining his fabled
control of detail. He has also pulled off
a tremendous feat of stylistic integration, fusing the legacy of twentieth-century modernism with glimpses of a twenty-first-century tonality. Even the
composer’s most committed admirers
are a little shocked: “Written on Skin”
feels like the work of a genius unleashed.
The libretto is by the playwright
Martin Crimp, with whom Benjamin
collaborated on his only previous attempt at music theatre, the 2006 chamber opera “Into the Little Hill.” That
piece was an oblique take on the story of
the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and “Written on Skin,” too, rings modern variations on ancient material—the legendary life of the Catalan troubadour
Guillem de Cabestaing. Like “Pelléas et
Mélisande” and “Wozzeck,” two operas
that lurk behind it, “Written on Skin” is
a love triangle with an unhappy outcome. In the original telling, Guillem
falls in love with his patron’s wife,
Agnès, and sings her praises. When the
lord finds out, he kills Guillem, removes
his heart, cooks it, and serves it to
Agnès, who, on learning what she has
consumed, swears that she will never
again eat or drink, so that she can preserve her lover’s taste in her mouth.
Fleeing her husband’s wrath, she runs
to a balcony and throws herself to her
death.
Aware that too many operas have
ended with a woman’s perishing, Crimp
questions the premises of the genre as
he goes. The plot is framed by a trio of
contemporary angels who conjure away
our world—“Strip the cities of brick . . .
strip out the wires and cover the land
with grass”—and summon medieval
times. The present keeps bleeding
through, however; at one point, the
Guillem figure, who here becomes a
painter of illuminated manuscripts and
is called the Boy, has a vision of “this
wood and this light . . . cut through by
eight lanes of poured concrete.” At intervals, listeners are reminded that in
this recovered past Jews are being
stoned, that criminals are being tortured, that male bonding can mask homoerotic desire, and, above all, that
women are being confined to a status of
illiterate obedience. Agnès, whose first
word is a defiant “No!,” pushes the Boy
to depict the world as it really is and, in
her final utterance, suggests that the tale
of their love will help to liberate those
who hear it.
Benjamin’s score conveys a similar
ambivalence about the conventions of
operatic doom. It begins with an orchestral melee—brass, winds, and
strings swirling into astringent dissonances. Such acts of harmonic
aggression are commonplace in the
annals of modern music: in Berg’s
“Lulu,” a twelve-note barrage signals the murder of the title character. But Benjamin’s dissonances
are not just signals of horror. They
have their own organic logic, and
tend to resolve into simple, sustained intervals. They come across
as anguished assertions of will.
And in the climactic scene of the
grisly meal the chords trade hands
in a significant fashion. At the beginning, a series of screaming six-note sonorities frames the icily detached voice of the lord—called
the Protector—as he serves his
cannibal dish. By scene’s end, as
Agnès wends her way toward a
convulsive high C, the same chords
recur in clipped bursts, their ferocity converted to her cause.
An epilogue adds a dimension of cosmic mystery to an already intricate construction. The angels,
observing Agnès’s fall, whisk us
back to the paved-over present,
their eyes exhibiting “cold fascination with human disaster.” In an
interview, Crimp said that he had in mind Walter Benjamin’s famous description of a painting by
Paul Klee—the “angel of history”
who surveys the wreckage of the past while being blown backward into the future. The opera ends
with a similarly fraught image of progress. The lower orchestra heaves a
Mahlerian sigh of grief, with a hint of D
major darkening to D minor. A glass
harmonica and a bass viol float eerie
sonorities, suggestive of wan light. But
the dominant sound comes from that
twitchy ensemble of oboes, trumpets,
strings, and bongos, dancing enigmatically in place. The last sound you hear is a high C on the violins, echoing Agnès’s final cry, with maracas rustling underneath. It feels like a question mark hanging over the future of the species.
The inaugural production of “Written on Skin” is by the restlessly inventive theatre director Katie Mitchell.
At the outset, contemporary figures flit
about in a fluorescent-lit laboratory, apparently engaged in the restoration
of a medieval manuscript. So immersed
are they in their labors that they begin
to reënact the story. The conceit produces some gripping images—at the
end, Agnès moves in slow motion up a
white concrete stairwell—yet the behind-the-scenes activity periodically
disrupts the ebb and flow of the music. Between the second and third scenes,
anticipating another entrance by the
omniscient angels, Benjamin writes a
magical transition in which triads melt
into lush dissonances. Onstage, Mitchell’s bustling figures seem indifferent to
the gorgeous blossoming of the sound.
Future stagings, and they will come,
should seek a more fluid response to
the opera’s tricky temporal structure.
The opening-night cast at Covent
Garden, which duplicates that
of the première in Aix, last summer—there is a recording of
those performances, on the Nimbus label—had no weak links.
The soprano Barbara Hannigan
gave a vivid, exacting portrait of
Agnès, her voice secure up to
high C. The rich-voiced baritone
Christopher Purves added wily
nuances to the menacing Protector. The countertenor Bejun
Mehta exuded sacred passion as
the Boy and as the lead angel, airily executing the Handelian ornaments that Benjamin wove into
the part. The composer conducted, eliciting lustre and heat
in equal measure.
Covent Garden has done Benjamin a favor by lowering ticket
prices for the run: the most expensive seats are sixty-five pounds,
the cheapest three pounds. The
less moneyed classes are, as a rule,
more open to new music, and there
were no empty seats on the first
night. The company used the same
scheme for a January revival of
Harrison Birtwistle’s “The Minotaur,” which had its première at the
house in 2008. It is a grungy masterpiece in an unrepentant brutalist style, with a production, by Stephen Langridge, that wallows in
violence and gore. Despite those
elements—or, more likely, because
of them—the run was essentially
sold out. For coming years, Covent Garden has announced commissions
from Georg Friedrich Haas, Thomas
Adès, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Unsuk
Chin, and Kaija Saariaho, among others. Against all odds, London’s plush
old house has established itself as a
global center for new opera. In comparison, the Met, for all its technological
pizzazz, looks archaic.