Birtwistle - The Mask of Orpheus (London, 2019)

Harrison Birtwistle - The Mask of Orpheus

English National Opera, 2019

Martyn Brabbins, James Henshaw, Daniel Kramer, Peter Hoare, Marta Fontanais-Simmons, James Cleverton, Claron McFadden, Daniel Norman, Claire Barnett-Jones, Simon Bailey, Matthew Smith, Alfa Marks, Leo Hedman

The Coliseum, London - 18th October 2019

The Greek myth of Orpheus and his journey to the Underworld to rescue his dead wife Eurydice has been recounted in opera in many different ways, but essentially the story is simple in its telling and in its meaning. It's about love, loss, life, bereavement, endurance, coming to terms with death as a part of life, a theme that can give rise to and be expressed in the highest orders of artistic creativity. Did I say simple? There is of course nothing simple about those themes, neither individually not when combined. It's even more complicated when you add in, as Harrison Birtwistle does in this account of the myth in The Mask of Orpheus, the vagaries of time, the repetition of memory and the unreliability of myth distorting the truth.

Birtwistle's The Mask of Orpheus is anything but simple, but in comparison to other accounts you have to wonder does it really need to be this complex? This version has three Orpheuses, three Euridices and three Aristeuses, representing the man, the myth, the hero. These splits are further fractured and intertwined through the vagaries of memory, dreams, delusions that result eventually (but by no means clearly) in a coming to terms with reality, or at least with the complexities of reality. The reformist Gluck wouldn't have approved such over-elaboration nor presumably would Monteverdi have countenanced the destruction of the illusion of man aspiring to the gods and coming close to attaining it in the expression of his music.

Musically however, Birtwistle score is just that ambitious and a performance of The Mask of Orpheus is still a thing of wonder, unlike anything else in opera. At the current ENO production it requires two conductors to manage the vast and unusual arrangement of brass, woodwind and percussion combined with Barry Anderson's IRCAM-derived experimental electronics. It creates an extraordinary sound that fully explores the complexity of situations and moods, the abstraction and repetition, the echo of time and ritual of myth. Peter Zinovieff's libretto is abstract and fragmented, often obscure and unfathomable in vocalised fragments of words. Stockhausen's Licht has nothing on this except length, and even then The Mask of Orpheus is testing at over three and a half hours long.

Inevitably Orpheus's journey in the opera is extremely hard to follow or grasp onto anything concrete. It does however have a very definite form and structure, tri-partite in acts, in its interweaving of three incarnations of the three principal characters. There are three scenes in the first Act and two sets of three allegorical myths interspersed throughout as dance interludes (three 'passing clouds' and three 'allegorical flowers'), but the opera fractures into other directions, Orpheus passing through 17 arches in Act II, Act III divided into eight episodes and an 'Exodos'. The music is just as complex in its composition and form, fractured, episodic, repetitive, interweaving replaying and transforming.

The Mask of Orpheus is evidently an experimental work, an enormous undertaking in an unconventional musical form (with its use of electronics) that Birtwistle hasn't really attempted on this scale anywhere else. Does the experiment yield any great insights into the myth? Should it be possible to grasp some deeper meaning? With the music giving expression, does it even need a narrative? What then should be the role of a director in all this? Should he attempt to make sense of it, to impose a path at least if not a narrative? Paths are important in The Mask of Orpheus and Daniel Kramer's production at least adheres to the unconventional structural path that the opera explores, but it obscures at least distracts when you hope it might illuminate.

Illuminating The Mask of Orpheus is an unenviable challenge admittedly, but Kramer's idea of illuminating doesn't really extend beyond drenching the work in garish day-glo pinks, greens and blues. There's some attempt to encompass the multiple levels of the work up there on the stage, its repetition, its simultaneous echoing of multiple views of past, present, future, myth and reality, but there's also much that is unnecessary. A crass bombardment of colour, projections and quite absurd cabaret or circus-like costumes do little more than fulfil the function of distinguishing one group from another but there's little that appears to connects to the music, to the narrative or themes.

A director like Achim Freyer can get away with that kind of eccentricity in design, but there at least there is an effort towards logic or symbolism even if it can be abstract it the extreme. Here the approach feels completely inappropriate for the subject and the work, over-complicating, making it almost impossible to follow everything that is going on and who is who at any given time. It's not necessarily a case that simplification is required, as it's hard to imagine how you could do that and be true to the structure of the work and music, but the problem seems to be that there appears to be no real feeling for the work or understanding of it in the direction.

The same accusation fortunately can't be levelled at the musical direction. Martyn Brabbins, assisted by James Henshaw, more than met the considerable challenges of this unconventional score and the very high expectations I personally had to hear it performed live. The sound within the Coliseum was incredible, the orchestration opening out the score, creating an enveloping mood that is there within the dynamic of the score and its collision of acoustic and electronic elements. It's been over thirty years since it was performed in full during its original run in 1986 so it's certainly worth taking the opportunity to hear it, and it sounds tremendous in the auditorium of the Coliseum.

While it was hard to follow who was singing what at any stage due to the cut-up and blend nature of the work - not helped at all by the obscure costumes and busy stage - it was clear there were no areas of weakness in the singing either. Peter Hoare as the principal, older Odysseus (The Man) and Claron McFadden as The Oracle of the Dead were identifiable and certainly notable for meeting the singing and performing challenges of the work. For the musical performance alone this was an extraordinary evening at the opera of a rare and exceptional work, but one unfortunately let down by an ill-considered production design and direction of no discernible artistic merit. 

Links: English National Opera

Birtwistle - Punch and Judy (Armel Opera Festival, 2014 - Webcast)

Harrison Birtwistle - Punch and Judy

Neue Oper Wien, 2014

Walter Kobéra, Leonard Prinsloo, Richard Rittelmann, Manuela Leonhartsberger, Till von Orlowsky, Jennifer Yoon, Lorin Wey, Johannes Schwendinger, Evamaria Mayer

Armel Opera Festival, ARTE Concert - 14 October 2014

With its Commedia dell' Arte origins and the violence of its content, the Punch and Judy English seaside puppet show was always a curious subject for a children's entertainment, but it's evident that the sinister nature of the show has inevitably had a marked impression on a generation of children. Much like the adult response now towards clowns, what once seemed like fun in a more innocent age now appears somewhat sinister and unsettling. Harrison Birtwistle's opera Punch and Judy takes advantage of all these connotations related to the origins and the nature of the work as well as what the appeal of it says about the English character.

The work caused a bit of a stir when it was premiered in 1968, with Benjamin Britten reportedly walking out of a performance of the work at Aldeburgh. Since Britten himself had a somewhat conflicted and critical view of the nature of the English society in his opera works, it's hard to imagine that he found the subject of Punch and Judy entirely unappealing, although it does admittedly push violence much further and take what appears to be a more extreme cartoonish view of character than anything in Britten's work. I would think that Britten's difficulty with Birtwistle's opera (if it's even true), may however lie in the unsettling nature of the music.

Even now at the age of 80, with several major celebrations this year to mark the occasion, Harrison Birtwistle has never been an accepted part of the musical establishment. His work can be difficult to listen to and challenging of conventions. Punch and Judy, amongst all the other reasons why the subject might be distasteful and vaguely disturbing, uses musical ideas, structures and dissonance in a way that is similar to, or perhaps even intentionally evokes resonances with Berg's treatments of the dark, violent subjects of Lulu and Wozzeck. With a fine libretto by Stephen Pruslin that perfectly suits Birtwistle's intent and structural methods, the work uses cyclical repetition and subtle subversion of musical and text motifs for impact.

The story of Punch and Judy is a familiar one, although over the years it has evolved its own pantomime conventions and characters. Punch, derived form the Commedia dell' Arte character Pulcinella, is a mean and violent trickster. The story itself has become a by-word for marital strife of a particularly violent nature. In Punch and Judy, Punch, disappointed with family life and attracted to the unattainable beauty of Pretty Polly, casually throws his baby in the fire, and when his wife discovers what he has done he brutally stabs her to death. Punch's efforts to win over Pretty Polly drive him to further crimes and murders of a doctor, a lawyer and his friend Choregos.

A grotesque parody of Commedia dell' Arte archetypes combined with some theatre of the absurd mannerisms; a satire of the English character as exemplified by life in seaside towns; Punch and Judy is a study of misery and malevolence that recognises some very disturbing as well as familiar character traits. Birtwistle's music and Pruslin's libretto don't so much expand on the character of Punch as take it out further into the world and consider it in the greater scheme of things. This Punch is geographically, astrologically, mathematically, musically, seasonally and colourfully located on his journey of destruction and mindless violence, and he wreaks havoc over the whole spectrum of human endeavour.

The only way the work can be any more sinister and disturbing is when it is staged, and the Neue Oper Wien production, performed at the Armel Opera Festival in Budapest, is truly the stuff of nightmares. "The bitterness of this moment is undeniably sweet/ The sweetness of this moment is undeniably bitter" is one of the recurrent phrases and motifs in the work, and that's the tone a staging of the work has to aim for. Leonard Prinsloo's direction for the Neue Oper Wien and Monika Biegler's set and costume design resembles something from Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton's worst nightmares.

That comparison suggests stylisation, but Punch and Judy should be aiming for archetypal rather than realism, and it has that here with an extra bite of grit and shadowy mystery. If you could imagine Burton or Gilliam directing Wozzeck, it might look something like this, but there are other operatic references worth considering in this field including Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges and even Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann. Pretty Polly, the unattainable object of Punch's desires, would appear to be very much modelled on Olympia, the mechanical doll of Hoffmann's somewhat disturbing and illicit fascination. Pretty Polly even has the same high-end soprano range - even more exaggerated here - and it's sung marvellously by Jennifer Yoon in the production performed here at the Armel Opera Festival.

All of the roles however call for very specific voice ranges, and the casting elsewhere is impressive. There was an extraordinary power and beauty to mezzo-soprano Manuela Leonhartsberger's Judy/Fortune Teller, and Till von Orlowsky also impressed as Choregos. The principal role however, and the competition role for the festival was Hungarian Richard Rittelmann who handled the high baritone range of Punch very well. There's nothing easy about Birtwistle's writing for the voice and the role is also a physical one in a one-act opera that is almost two hours long, but like the rest of the cast, Rittlemann just threw himself into the madness of it all. That's the way to do it.

Links: ARTE Concert, Armel Opera Festival