Opera
All music, no words
Geoffrey Wheatcroft talks to Sir Harrison Birtwistle about The Second Mrs Kong According to received opinion, 'Eng- land is the Land ohne Musik', Glynde- bourne is little more than a picnic with antique musical intermissions, and Sir Har- rison Birtwistle is an abstruse composer. Happily enough, received opinion is all too often wrong. Glyndebourne have commiss- sioned a new opera from Birtwistle. The Second Mrs Kong was previewed out of sea- son last autumn, toured hither and yon (I caught it at Woking, where I can honestly say I hadn't been to the opera before), and now returns to Glyndebourne for its festi- val debut proper, with an extremely distin- guished cast under Elgar Howarth. If you wanted evidence that there is life in Glyn- debourne — and in English music — look and listen no further.
Sir Harrison (and I'll bet he didn't expect to end up as that 40 years ago) is an engaging, humourous, shabby, tubby Lan- castrian, who turned 60 last year. He was born in Accrington, but when he was a boy his father sold his small shop in the town and moved out to a farm. In fact, although he has been in artistic revolt most of his life against English pastoralism, he has always lived by choice in the country, and `I've always been lucky with views.'
In the early Sixties he lived in one of the prettiest parts of England, west of Salis- bury: a little incongruously, he was music master at Cranborne Chase, the toffish- bohemian girls' school, by whose old girls he is still remembered with amused affec- tion. For some years after that he and his family lived in the Hebrides, with a view towards Skye so beautiful 'it was like a bereavement', but in practical terms life there was exhausting. Then when he was working in Paris he found a house in south- west France which is still his home. We met not there, alas, but in his London flat, in the Isle of Dogs of all places — he is still lucky with views: from the 18th floor he gazes up river to the City and Westminster rather than at Canary Wharf — where he is based while he finishes his commission for this year's Proms.
He belongs to a remarkable generation of English musicians. At the Royal Manch- ester College of Music his contemporaries included (now Professor) Alexander Goehr and (now Sir Peter) Maxwell Davies. They have sometimes been called a school, which they aren't in any sense. At one time he and Maxwell Davies were collaborators in the Pierrot Players, but that group came to an abrupt end in circumstances still not wholly explained. When asked about it, Birtwistle gives for the first but not the last time an elusive faraway smile rather than an answer.
His career has been divided between instrumental music and music theatre. As he explains it, he isn't inspired in the first place by a libretto (or play or novel). But whenever he has a musical idea, he almost always finds it 'moving into theatre', and then tries to find a dramatic idea to fit. The succession of operas, or stage works, began with Punch and Judy, first performed at Aldeburgh in 1966, when legend says that Benjamin Britten walked out in the middle, although Birtwistle says he was unaware of that at the time.
Even if you have the idea for an opera, you need a libretto. Birtwistle suspects that ideally the composer should write it him- self, 'but I don't have that sort of expertise' (could he really not write librettos with as much literary distinction as Wagner's or Tippett's?). He has also had a rapid turnover of librettists. Before I raise the subject, he observes that no one has ever written more than one libretto for him, and then leaves the observation in mid-air, behind that same elusive smile. The libret- to for The Second Mrs Kong is by Russell Hoban, who has recently been insisting in the columns of Opera that he is the equal creator of the opera with Birtwistle. In which case Schikaneder is equally the maker of The Magic Flute with Mozart: as the saying goes, merely to state the propo- sition is to demonstrate its absurdity.
Birtwistle's annus mirabilis was 1986. Two operas were premiered, The Mask of Orpheus at the Coliseum, and on the South Bank Yan Tan Tethera (one of at least three English operas about sheep to appear in the space of a few years, bemused cultur- al historians of the future may note). They are quite different, and both exhilarating. That year also, he won an Evening Standard opera award, and a Grawameyer award with a not-to-be-sneezed at $150,000, while Channel 4 broadcast a four-part series about his life and works (It feels like I'm dead,' he said at the time).
When I saw him, Birtwistle had just returned from Munich where he had received the Siemens Prize, a very big deal indeed, whose list of eminent recipients begins with Britten. Mrs Kong is being pro- duced shortly in Germany and Austria. Six years ago Harry Birtwistle was knighted. By any standards he is a success. Is it another case of the youthful rebel joining the estab- lishment in his wise maturity? Was he in fact — is he still — an avant- garde com- poser?
He doesn't see himself as such. To be avant-garde, 'you have to know the thing you're in front of, and I've never had any consciousness of that'. He rejected Britten as much as Vaughan Williams, but only in the sense of not wanting to be them, not in the sense of wanting to be against them or the opposite of them. He has scarcely become an academic or conservative fig- ure. And yet, in some ways Birtwistle is dis- mayed by what has happened to music since he was a young radical.
Like anyone with an ounce of music in him, he detests the charade known as 'min- imalism', which slithered in from some- where, 'and with any luck will slither away before long.' He is depressed also by the degradation of music represented by Clas- sic FM, and canned music, and 'Polish composers', and all that. But he still has the capacity to get up the noses of fat-headed fuddy-duddies. At the Covent Garden premiere of his last opera Gawain four years ago there was a protest of sorts — recruited, they do say, through The Spectator — though it went off halfcock. There were also demonstrations the other way: Alfred Brendel, among oth- ers, stood and cheered in the stalls. And It is a possibility at least to be considered that Brendel is almost as good a judge of music as our gang of fogies. The Glyndebourne Kong is followed by `Panic', his new piece for the Proms. 'When I was 14 I wanted to write "Piper at the Gate of Dawn" — from The Wind in the Willows.' After nearly half a century, this theme has bubbled up in his imagination as a work for alto sax, drum kit and orchestra. There is not quite an improvisatory ele- ment; but 'it's like I imagine giving an actor a text, and then working on it together'.
If 'Panic' is as absorbing and exciting as The Seond Mrs Kong it will be worth mak- ing some little effort to see. And if there's an empty seat for Kong at Glyndebourne, or a single cat-call at the first night, then the audience, rather than the festival itself, will deserve the worst things received opin- ion says.
There are seven performances of The Second Mrs Kong at Glyndebourne from Tuesday 23 May. 'Panic' is performed at the Proms on 16 September.
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