MICHAEL NYMAN talks
to John Leeman about his opera Man
and Boy: Dada
Michael Nyman has been touring
the UK promoting his CD, The Piano
Sings, which inaugurated
his own new label, MN records. I met
him in the Café/Bar of the Sage
Concert Hall, Gateshead on 7 November
2005 shortly before he was about to
perform on stage. We talked about the
CD of his latest opera, recently released
on the same label and which I was to
review
. Below is an edited account
of our meeting:-
JL: Do you see the
CD as a sonic experience in its own
right rather than as a representation
of what is primarily a piece of musical
theatre?
MN: Oh absolutely -
sometimes it’s a great joy to have operas
put on the stage because it shows you’re
taken seriously as a producer and as
a director and as a caster and lighting
designer; and I constantly say that
opera is what I want to do more than
anything else because it does combine
all these elements, but when you have
a bad production, badly directed, badly
cast , badly sung and badly lit, and
the designs are not very good, you think…hmm…
why do I do this? I write operas in
the same way I write film music – I
do write it to be substantial and self
contained although there is a desire
to have a bit of video there … a bit
of stage trickery. There is a sense
with a lot of contemporary operas that
you don’t need to bother so much about
the music but I try to make the music
as authoritative as possible, so if
you listen to the CD you get a picture
of what’s happening on stage, the music
is strong enough to create the stage
picture, strong enough to create the
emotional life; and with Man and
Boy strong enough to create the
pre-history.
I think I’m a very
good opera composer. When I read reviews
of other people’s operas – new operas
– you read that the music was just the
sound track to what was happening on
stage and what the libretto tells you.
When I saw Man and Boy I was
very much aware that I had created a
music which the characters inhabited.
I’m doing what operas do - you know,
if you listen to Don Giovanni - composers
created a world that is unforgettable,
that is so operatic, and I think that’s
what all opera composers should do,
and you can either do it or you can’t
– just as either you can write a good
film cue or you can’t. You do it by
instinct and it either works or it doesn’t,
and I seem to be able to do both, but
I think that although people might say
that I spend a lot of my life accompanying
other people’s images and the music
is perhaps secondary, I think I’ve actually
trained myself up to partly write film
music to create an opera world which
takes you somewhere where you’ve never
been before, where the libretto doesn’t
tell you where to go because The
Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat
and also Facing Goya and Man
and Boy are not like - you know,
The Silver Tassie or whatever
– there isn’t a story, a story there
where people are doing things which
in a way obligates you to write a certain
kind of music. Just as in The Man
who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, abstraction
was the name of the game – I could start
from wherever I chose and so to a slightly
lesser degree I can with Man and
Boy although there has to be the
love interest, there has to be the tea
time music, there has to be the rather
rigorous single harmony music for when
Schwitters is planning his war time
tale. And the other thing the music
does in an opera, which I think I do
better than anyone else, is being able
to switch - I mean in a way that people
can’t do in films and I don’t think
you can do in literature, but it’s still
the same medium. To be able to switch
from Schwitters saying/singing about
the destruction of his world and his
life and his wife and his painting by
the Nazis ....and then the woman says
"we can have a cup of tea",
not only by montage but also by creating
musical identities which are so
contradictory. You can just switch…..
Yes, you’ve got the
ability to do these emotional short
cuts which generates a powerful conciseness…
Yes, exactly, and two
things amaze me, or surprise me, or
intrigue me about the score and that
is partly the ability to make this emotional
switch and the other thing is that I’m
still, from an orchestration point of
view, amazed at where this chamber music
came from. It was something to do with
not using the Michael Nyman Band, not
having the saxophone block and using
individual instruments I don’t usually
use like oboes and bassoons and my pet
hates, and there’s no big brass section.
Because of that I’ve been forced to
write a music which is much more to
do with the establishment chamber orchestra
feel. Whereas the Michael Nyman Band
is like a twelve piece ensemble, this
is a kind of nonet, very much in an
older tradition.
(On the subject
of chamber orchestration, I related
to Michael Nyman my experience on first
hearing the music which was that, a
minute into the opera there starts a
passage which convinced me he was alluding
– or paying tribute – to Richard Strauss’s
only chamber opera, Ariadne auf
Naxos, specifically the commedia
dell’ arte scenes. Not only were there
textural connections but clear melodic
and rhythmic similarities (dum diddle
dum dum). He said he’d never thought
of that and I said how lucky it was
that I met him to clear it up because
I would have made a fool of myself by
declaring, in my review, this to be
obviously the case.)
But he then said:
Yes, but sometimes
I can allude to things without knowing,
and the interesting thing is that when
I write an opera like Man and Boy
I generate a whole bunch
of material regardless of where it’s
going to go - what it’s associated with
- so that dum diddle dum dum
was just something that came to me and
then I realised that as it’s comedic,
it’s also neutral enough to constantly
add different bass lines..
Yes, it becomes a very
strong leitmotiv…
Yes, exactly
There is another thing
I’ve got to ask you: about your inveterate
collecting which obviously connects
up with Michael and the fact that at
the time he doesn’t know why he collects
bus tickets, so presumably this idea
of creating order out of chaos is a
retrospective thing.
Well yes: what’s interesting
about that is something I discovered
that Schwitters actually said in 1919
and Michael Hastings (librettist)
has picked up on it. But I was just
a kid and I collected everything, and
it had nothing to do with order out
of chaos. I mean it’s kind of bizarre,
my brother collected everything. But
psychologically maybe there was something….
But being a collector
and list – maker, as you were, does
that not help to root things down that
otherwise might take off, or destabilise
one’s life.
(Michael Nyman
does not look entirely convinced)
It is a need for order.
I’ve got a theory about your music in
connection with that. I wonder if it
is why you love Purcell’s ground basses.
Well exactly..
because they anchor
down something that wants to take off.
I know, yes..
Bach doesn’t compose
his grounds like that, in the sense
that his melodies don’t subvert the
bass by going across the joins in the
way that Purcell’s do.
Yes. This is something
I feel a bit ashamed about when I began
working with Purcell, because Purcell
does go across the joins and
I don’t. If you look at something like
Queen of the Night (from Purcell’s
The Fairy Queen) where he modulates:
he’s in B minor and then he goes to
D major in the middle which Bach would
never have done ...
You see, the way I
sometimes hear your music, and particularly
in this opera, is that when the characters
are trying to take off - in the context
of what they’re doing - your basses
seem to become even more rooted. For
example when Michael and Kurt are riding
the bus, the boy suggests an adventure,
that they go to "the end of the
line" – what a metaphor! – you’ve
got a very strong, vigorous ostinato
that is very propelling but in its simplicity
also seems to pin things down, as if
to remind them to keep their feet on
the ground
Yes, yes ...
(We had to finish there,
since Michael Nyman was being reminded
by his entourage that he was due on
stage in a couple of minutes)
