George Benjamin's Written on Skin
An interview with the composer by Robert Hugill
George Benjamin’s first opera Into the Little Hill premiered
in Paris in 2006, reaching London in 2009 in a production by the Opera Group.
The librettist was the playwright Martin Crimp, author of Attempts on Her
Life. The opera was described by Rupert Christiansen in the Daily Telegraph
as ‘something quite exceptional, both in the originality of its form
and the depth of its inspiration.’ A recording of the work’s Paris
performance is available on Nimbus.
Crimp and Benjamin’s second collaboration, Written on Skin, was
a joint commission from the Aix-en-Provence Festival and the Royal Opera House,
Covent Garden. Whereas Into the Little Hill was a compact, one-act
opera with just 2 singers, Written on Skin is a full length three-act
opera albeit still on a compact basis, with a cast of just five singers. Written
on Skin premiered at Aix-en-Provence in 2012 in a production by Katie
Mitchell with the composer conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. The production
has already travelled to Amsterdam and to Toulouse (see the review
on Seen and Heard.
A live recording of the Aix-en-Provence performances is being released on
Nimbus this month (can be purchased through Musicweb
International now). Simultaneously the opera receives its UK premiere
at Covent Garden in Katie Mitchell’s production with the cast from Aix-en-Provence
(Christopher Purves, Barbara Hannigan, Bejun Mehta, Allan Clayton, Victoria
Simmonds) repeating their roles, conducted by the composer.
I interviewed George Benjamin to talk about Written on Skin in particular
and opera in general. Benjamin generously fitted me into his busy schedule
at Covent Garden, with our interview in his dressing room backed by sounds
of a stage rehearsal for Tosca and tannoy calls for personnel.
I asked him first, why he had waited such a long time before writing an opera,
given that he is a composer who clearly loves writing for the voice. He explained
that he could not find a way to write the right opera, and could not find
the right collaborator. For Benjamin, in a lot of modern operas when text
is set naturalistically it feels awkward and he finds himself wondering why
the characters are not in a film. He wanted to tell stories in opera, but
the text needed to be in some way abnormal, to be at another angle from regular.
This remained a dilemma, even though he approached a considerable number of
people about writing a suitable text.
Then a colleague at King’s College, London (where Benjamin is Henry
Purcell Professor of Composition), the American viola da gamba player Laurence
Dreyfus, introduced Benjamin to Martin Crimp. It was an arranged marriage,
Dreyfus knew Crimp and had in fact given him lessons. Like many arranged marriages,
it worked. Crimp’s method of using third person narration in his plays
whilst preserving clarity and narrative was a style that Benjamin found fascinating.
Here was an opening into the operatic world.
Both operas that they have worked on have a tightness and economy about them
that Benjamin attributes to the way he works, to his metabolic rate. Economy
comes naturally to him, he does not sprawl. The length of Written on Skin
is that of a film, which is a length that Benjamin thinks works well. Also,
he feels that perception of time in musical pieces can be deceptive and flexible,
that if music is densely written then the piece can feel more expansive.
Having now got two operas under his belt and having students who themselves
have written operas, I asked Benjamin if he thought that there was a problem
with contemporary opera in a way that there hadn’t been in the past.
He said first off that the challenge of writing opera is vast for any generation,
but more so now with the weight of tradition, adding that modern musical language
was not ideally suited to opera. There is an issue with writing for the voice
and he highlighted the importance of a perceptible connection between voice
and the music.
One or two of his students have written operas and he thinks that there is
no fixed way of doing it. But he points out that in the past, composers wrote
hundreds of songs before writing an opera. This is not something that happens
nowadays, but he strongly feels that young composers should understand the
voice and how to embed it in accompaniment. His reference to the complex issues
of tension, proportion and variety here clearly illustrated the way his thinking
has influenced the clarity and texture of his own operas.
When asked whether he worried about whether his own vocal lines were singable
he commented that he worried about everything, but that he relished the challenge
of writing for the voice. He loved the voice and found it an extraordinary
resource, and always ensured that the vocal line was paramount, in the foreground.
With Written on Skin, Benjamin did not just write vocal lines, he wrote
for particular singers, those taking part in the premiere and repeating the
performance at Covent Garden this month. Benjamin clearly relished both the
challenge and the opportunity of shaping his vocal writing to specific voices.
The principals in the opera consist of baritone Christopher Purves, soprano
Barbara Hannigan and counter-tenor Bejun Mehta with tenor Allan Clayton and
mezzo-soprano Victoria Simmonds making up the quintet. I commented on the
lack of a conventional operatic tenor hero and Benjamin said that there was
no way that he wanted a helden-tenor as the sound of the voice was just wrong.
The main male role is for the baritone, but Benjamin also found Bejun Mehta’s
counter-tenor voice and extraordinary musical resource and relished the way
he was able to write for Mehta and soprano Barbara Hannigan. The two voices,
so similar in pitch but so different in timbre, entwined together at and in
fact he does something similar with the mezzo-soprano and tenor voices in
the opera.
When I asked him if he modified his technique when writing a long dramatic
piece for voices, he said that he doesn’t have single technique, that
he invents the techniques and means as he writes and that every bar was a
challenge. But that, for an opera, he had to evolve new ways to control the
harmonic coherence and variety over a span, with enough contrast to maintain
interest and tension.
With the principal role given to a baritone, the first time Benjamin had written
a substantial amount for that voice type, he had to find new solutions to
writing for that voice type, particularly lower in the voice’s register.
Benjamin finds that for a modern composer the baritone voice is challenge,
as harmonies are thicker when you reach the bass clef and it is easy for textures
to become opaque and the voice lost in an aural mush. His solution was to
clear things out and make the harmony simpler. For anyone coming to Benjamin’s
operas for the the first time, one of the surprises and delights is their
clarity, that they do not simply reflect the denseness of some of his orchestral
writing.
Opera is clearly important to Benjamin, when asked if he had a favourite opera
he produced a list of operas that he loves, Boris Goudonov, Tristan
und Isolde, Parsifal, Salome, Pelleas et Melisande,
Wozzeck, Katya Kabanova, L’Enfant et les Sortileges,
then added a group of contemporary pieces to the list, Billy Budd, St Francois
d’Assise, Le Grand Macbre and Higgledy Piggledy Pop.
Of this list, it is Pelleas and Wozzeck that he loves the most.
The operas on this list are all dramatic, dealing in intense human problems
with rather dark subject matter. So it should come as no surprise that both
of Benjamin’s operas so far have confronted rather dark subjects. Into
the Little Hill is a modern re-telling of the story of the Pied Piper
and Hamlyn and Written on Skin is a version of a medieval Provencal
story in which a man kills his wife’s lover and feeds her the lover’s
cooked heart.
For Benjamin opera is a serious genre, one capable of great beauty and emotion
so that it is worth confronting deep matters. Opera moves him and he felt
that his should tackle dark material, particularly as this provides more meat
to work with; for Benjamin, this is one of the things opera is for.
Both of his operas explore the lack of communication between people, though
he says that he does not have a particular stick to beat here. There are moments
of real communication, but for him the tragedy in Written on Skin arises
through lack of communication, the incapacity of people to listen and to understand.
In the opera there are times when the singers sing simultaneously without
hearing, and Benjamin gives them different pitch modes and metres to emphasise
the lack of communication.
When conducting his own operas, and other works, Benjamin feels that he must
try and put himself at some distance from the work and not worry about honing
it further. He feels his role is to inspire the players and singers, the more
distance he can take the more useful he can be. He was fulsome in his praise
of the Royal Opera House orchestra, commenting that they responded beautifully
and it was a delight and privilege to work with them, making the music sound
like he imagined. Benjamin has no fixed image of the interpretation and enjoys
the way individual instrumentalists add their own character.
The work uses quite a distinctive instrumental mix, with slightly fewer strings
and more woodwind and brass than usual. He feels that it does not take much
to alter the sound of the orchestra, taking some instruments away and adding
some. For Benjamin this creates a different soundscape, and he finds it attractive
when starting a piece if the ensemble has something particular and specific
about it.
As well as the traditional orchestral instruments Benjamin has added two unusual
ones, a viola da gamba and a glass harmonica. In Aix-en-Provence the glass
harmonica was played by Alasdair Malloy. Malloy had visited Benjamin around
10 years ago and explained the instrument and its possibilities to the composer,
who had taken copious notes. Benjamin found the timbre of the instrument fascinating
and in Written on Skin he did new things with it such as giving the
player 10 note chords and splitting the hands so that the left provided accompaniment
to the more melodic right; things which are difficult but not impossible.
He has been deeply involved in the way the look and feel of the production
has developed. He comments that some composers have had a fight when their
work is presented but he has been lucky not to experience this. Katie Mitchell’s
production (in Vicky Mortimer’s designs) is very true to what Benjamin
and Crimp envisaged and for Benjamin the production brings the work to dramatic
life.
For me, one of the joys of Benjamin’s work with Martin Crimp is the
way the partnership seems to understand the form of opera, and how it can
be used in a contemporary way. Benjamin comments that for him form is everything.
Even though he did not write his first opera until he was in his late 40’s,
he has had a lot of experience in the theatre. As a boy at school he wrote
hundreds of scores for plays, both classics and new pieces. He has also accompanied
silent movies, and both he and Martin Crimp are lovers of the cinema. He comments
that he has a feeling for theatre, that it is in his veins; Benjamin is also
an opera lover, which probably helps. As a child he made operas up in his
head, using a book of Greek myths as the starting point for his stories. Whilst
at school he started writing an opera based on the Pied Piper of Hamlyn, though
it petered out after 30 pages. Benjamin adds that this was probably a good
thing as the piece was terrible.
Benjamin is a composer who certainly started young. His publishers, Faber
Music, have supported him since he was sixteen, his work Ringed by the
Flat Horizon was played at the BBC Proms when he was 20. Nimbus Records
started recording his music when he was 20 so that all of his work is available
on the label. The new recording of Written on Skin is taken from the
live performances at Aix-en-Provence last year. Benjamin is very positive
about this, commenting that though the result is not perfect, he likes that
the recording has truth energy and tension and he does not know whether this
would be achievable in the studio, adding that it would be lovely to have
a studio recording as well. For Benjamin the singers were emphatically wonderful
actors and this comes across when they sing.
Writing a piece as big as Written on Skin requires Benjamin to have
a fallow period, so he was very happy to be involved in the production of
the opera. After Covent Garden it travels to other countries (with performances
in Florence, Vienna and Paris) and Benjamin will conduct some further performances.
He has found the two months preparing the production a happy period, discovering
again the joy of being part of a theatre company something that he has not
done for 25 years and has missed.
Written on Skin seems to have been a very happy experience for George
Benjamin and the result is all set to be one of the most striking new operas
to be performed in the UK this year. Let us hope that he and Martin Crimp
do not stop at two works.
Written on Skin opens at Covent Garden on 8 March 2013 and continues
in repertory until 22 March.
Robert Hugill