Eldar - Like Flesh (Lille, 2022)

Sivan Eldar - Like Flesh

Opéra de Lille, 2022

Maxime Pascal, Silvia Costa, Helena Rasker, William Dazeley, Juliette Allen, Adèle Carlier, Hélène Fauchère, Guilhem Terrail, Sean Clayton, René Ramos Premier, Florent Baffi

OperaVision - January 2022

The subject of ecological disaster seems to be a common theme in many contemporary operas (and in contemporary writing), and it's not a surprise that this is might be one of the pressing issues at the moment for many people. If opera is to be meaningful and relevant it needs to tackle the issues of the day, and if it is to endure it has to be adaptable and universal. Sivan Eldar's Like Flesh makes a very successful attempt to work with ideas that have endured for a long time, drawing influence from Ovid's Metamorphoses, not to mention using a medium that has been around for centuries - opera of course - while at the same time finding a way through the music to remain modern in its expression of the drama.

As a way of approaching the subject in the form of a chamber opera, the librettist Cordelia Lynn comes up with a very concise and meaningful way of expressing the dilemma (much more successfully I feel than Tom Coult's recent Violet) though just three characters. Not a word is wasted as the three characters represent different sides of the equation. The man is a forester concerned with making the most of the catastrophe in a world that is beginning to feel the consequences of climate change, but his idea of making the most is to make money out of it. The woman, his wife, feels a closer bond with nature and sadness at the loss of the richness that was once there. There is also a student, a scientist, who is observing the changes, wanting to find a way if not to reverse the damage - it's too late for that - to at least minimise its impact.

I say that there are three characters, but there is a fourth and that is the first voice we hear in the opera; the trees. The trees have been around a long time and have observed the changes that have occurred ever since man brought an axe into the forest for the first time (recognising the handle as "one of our own"). The voice of the forest is present throughout and in between the scenes, remembering "what the humans did next", but their voice is also seductive to the woman, who begins to show signs of not just becoming closer to nature, but being as one with nature in her transformation into a tree.

You could even say that there is a fifth character in the opera, but then you could say that the music is a distinct character in almost any opera. Here however, it does have a very important role and presence. Searching for a way of creating an approriate and effective sound world for the opera, seeing it as vitally important as a voice for Like Flesh, Sivar turned to the still important technicians of IRCAM for inspiration. The opera was developed using electronic sounds with the assistance of Augustin Muller, but the opera uses both acoustic and electronic playing, creating a voice that in a way represents the uneasy relationship between man and nature, although neither is solely associated solely with one type of sound.

In the hands of Le Balcon and the musical direction of Maxime Pascal, skilled practitioners of contemporary music with electronic effects who are notably also currently presenting a complete cycle of Stockhausen's epic Licht, the complexities and intricacies of Like Flesh are in safe hands. I daresay that the presentation is much more effective in a live environment, as speakers have been placed not just around the theatre in Lille, but also under the seats in order to place the audience entirely within the opera. Considering the intimate nature of the chamber operas arrangements and the sound effects, you can imagine that this would be hugely effective for this particular work in the theatre. For someone listening to a recording of the opera however, it does seem to rely too much on atmospheric drones and is not so musical.

The presentation is just another element and it's the combination and successful deployment of all the other elements that mark this out as a success - the opera notably winning the 202I FEDORA Prize for Opera. Primarily, I however I feel that a large part of why it works so well is down to the strength of the libretto; in its symbolism, its poetry and the concision in how it gets across its ideas. I was particularly impressed as I wasn't keen on Cordelia Lynn's previous libretto for Katie Mitchell's feminist revisionist take on 'The Tempest' with Purcell music as Miranda. Sivan mentions in one of the interviews that the love triangle is not just a metaphor for the destruction of the environment, but the destruction of the environment is also a metaphor for relationships and perhaps even sexual identity. I think this really does come across and contribute to the very human element of the work, rather than it being a preachy environmental catastrophe warning.

The singing puts these ideas across beautifully and with deep feeling. It's a small cast of only three principals and a chorus, and there may be a lot of recitative-like spoken singing in English, but there are fine performances all round from Helena Rasker as the Woman, William Dazeley as her husband, the Forester and Juliette Allen as the Student. The chorus too as the forest, play a huge role, as they should in keeping with the theme of the work, with good solo singing and fine harmonies that indeed present an seductive impression of peace and harmony.

The stage production is another vital component in the overall quality and success of this staging of the opera. It is just beautiful, making stunning use of projections created by Francesco D’Abbraccio, but also effective in the simple transformation scenes and in the movements of the actors and chorus. It all comes together, working with the music and the performances to get across the intent of the opera's important ecological message in a tremendously effective way.

Links: Le Balcon, OperaVision, Opéra de Lille

Haas - Morgen und Abend (Royal Opera House, 2015 - London)

Georg Friedrich Haas - Morgen und Abend

Royal Opera House, 2015

Michael Boder, Graham Vick, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Christoph Pohl, Sarah Wegener, Will Hartmann, Helena Rasker

Royal Opera House - 28 November 2015 

There must have been some kind of communication breakdown between the stage and the audience on the first night of Georg Friedrich Haas's new opera Morgen und Abend when it opened at the Royal Opera House on 13th November. When I caught the work at the last of its five world premiere performances at Covent Garden, I saw little that corresponded with some of the indifferent to outright dismissive reviews of the work in the press. On the contrary, this was a spellbinding piece that held the audience rapt over its 90 minute running time, was warmly received and even enthusiastically applauded at the curtain call.

Undoubtedly however, the subject and the musical approach of the work are very different from what one is accustomed to hearing on the main stage at Covent Garden. The meaning or progress of the work would be difficult to grasp simply because it is about something that isn't capable of being easily defined and for which there are is no familiar musical accompaniment. By which I mean that the subject is Death, and it's not accompanied here by either by the dramatic build-up and crescendos that usually accompany an on-stage expiration, nor by mournful laments that follow. Rather in his adaptation of Jon Fosse's drama 'Morgon og Kveld', G. F. Haas's Morgen und Abend (Morning and Evening) explores the moment of transition between those two more familiar states - the moment of death itself.

That, admittedly, leaves the listener not quite sure where they are or how they should be responding to the lack of dramatic narrative. In the long prologue, an old fisherman called Olai (Klaus Maria Brandauer) sits in a grey sterile landscape, unsure himself where he is or what he is supposed to be doing. In Graham Vick's production design, there's a door, but it stands alone, there are chairs and a bed, but also an abandoned fishing boat. Everything slowly revolves, time operating in a circular fashion, where the ending is also the beginning. Gradually, the old man comes to realise that he is dead, but paradoxically, he is reliving the moment when his son Johannes was born. Johannes is no sooner born than Olai makes his exit through the door, and Johannes is no sooner born than he too makes his way onto the grey stage of his death.

What has happened in between is ...well, life - and Morgen und Abend isn't particularly concerned with that. A few articles have suggested that the lack of familiarity in the English speaking world with Jon Fosse's work, in contrast to his high literary standing in Europe, could have further alienated the UK audience, but the question of passing over is common in literature, and even in mainstream cinema (in 'Ghost' or 'The Sixth Sense'). While deaths frequently occur in many operas, it's true however that exploration of death itself is not at all common. The dead may have a voice in opera, going right back 400 years to the earliest works by Peri and Monteverdi's on the Orpheus myth 400 years ago, but even though the state of death is considered in Orpheus' journey to the underworld, and it is particularly the main focus in Gluck's version of the myth - opera's treatment of death (even in the martyrdom of Donizetti's Poliuto or Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites) is almost always qualified by desire to live.

Life is not entirely absent from Fosse and Haas's Morgen und Abend, but it's a shadow world that is far beyond reach. That fishing boat has already sailed. Johannes, still unable to comprehend where he is and what has happened, is confused by the appearance of his dead wife and his living daughter, but also by the need he feels to visit his old friend Peter, help him cut his hair and go out fishing with him once again. As the appearance of Olai on the stage just before Johannes appears, this (Death) is a place where time no longer follows familiar rules. Everyone exists here simultaneously, but they are also alone. It's not a place either for contemplation of one's life or weighing up the balance of one's achievements - it just is.

If there is any justification for there being a communication breakdown between the opera and the audience then, it's hardly due to the content of the libretto, as "difficult" and uncommon as the subject it deals with might be. The synopsis is summarised in a single line in the Royal Opera House programme - "Morgen und Abend (Morning and Evening) is the struggle of Johannes into and out of life". There's not much you have to 'get' here. A more valid concern appears to be the inability on the first night to hear Klaus Maria Brandauer's Olai's spoken monologue over the orchestra and percussion. This criticism seems to have been taken on board at Covent Garden, and when performed at the final performance on the 28th November, Brandauer had evidently been hitched up to a radio microphone and could be clearly heard in the mix.

I would also find it difficult to accept that anyone would find the music of Georg Friedrich Haas difficult to grasp either. It's true that the Austrian composer has a much higher profile elsewhere in Europe, and his work is not as well known in the UK. It's also true that Haas works experimentally in improvisation and microtonalites, as well as with works that have directions to be performed in pitch darkness, but his music is not inaccessible or only of interest to music scientists. Nor is it cold and theoretical, but as Morgen und Abend and the composer's other works in the lyric medium testify, Haas is very much interested in transitional human states, as uncommon and indefinable as some of those might appear to be.

In Morgen und Abend, the music is beautiful, haunting and fully connected to the interim nature of the state of non-existence, of being neither here nor there. Notes hypnotically slip and slide, the pitch is bent, stretched and altered, wavering between one state and another with percussive jolts thundering and echoing moments of confusion, recognition and realisation. There's a hypnotic flow here that finds a musical equivalent for Jon Fosse's unpunctuated flow of words, but Haas also writes beautifully for the voice, with variety of expression (in spoken dialogue and singing) and in the blending together of voices and the music, sections of which are underpinned with the ahhhh-ah hum of a rather more musically conventional heavenly chorus. A strong cast provided all the necessary colour.

Morgen und Abend is a modern opera in the truest sense. It's musically progressive and experimental, seeking to find the truest musical expression for its subject in an inventive way, not falling back on familiar operatic models or musical conventions but not destroying them either. There are no grand ambitions here to satisfy public or critical tastes by making grand musical or dramatic gestures, but rather Georg Friedrich Haas follows the artistic imperative of exploring the subject through his own musical language, and Morgen und Abend quietly impresses.

BBC Radio 3 will broadcast a recording of Morgen und Abend at the Royal Opera House on Saturday 5th December.  It will be available for listening on the BBC iPlayer for four weeks after this date.

Links: Royal Opera House, BBC Radio 3