Flying high with music and words
Henrietta Bredin talks to the composer Jonathan Dove about his latest commissions
The titles of Jonathan Dove’s musical works — Flight, Tobias and the Angel, Palace in the Sky, The Little Green Swallow, Man on the Moon — might lead one to consider his winged surname a highly appropriate one. However, while the composer undoubtedly possesses a soaring imagination, it is allied to a refreshingly pragmatic, earthbound streak, and he is also the author of the more prosaically titled Pig, Greed and An Old Way to Pay New Debts.
‘I don’t work to an inner manifesto but I suppose that, in my operatic writing, I am always exploring something about where the boundaries of opera are, opera and theatre. I’m trying to reclaim the art form for a broader audience.’ He is currently reclaiming on all sides. With writer Alasdair Middleton he has created this year’s Young Vic Christmas show, The Enchanted Pig; his television opera about Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, will be broadcast by Channel 4 in late December; and a new opera, Pinocchio, has been commissioned for performance by Opera North at the end of 2007. In addition, the wondrously renovated Young Vic theatre reopened with a revival of Dove’s community opera Tobias and the Angel, which was an overwhelming success, adored by audiences and participants alike.
Was his first musical instinct a theatrical one? Has he always liked the idea of what words and music can do together?
‘Thinking back there was always music and there was always theatre, but they were separate things. I’d sit at the piano for hours every day just making up music, and I made lots of model theatres, of increasingly elaborate mechanical contrivance. The last one used up nearly all of my Meccano set; it had ultra-violet light, a hydraulic bridge and a revolving stage. I tended not to put any productions on but I made a lot of lovely scene changes. When I was a child, my cousin was a stage manager at the Greenwich Theatre so we used to spend a lot of time there. So there was a love of theatre and there was me sitting at the piano, but I do remember quite often I had a book propped open on the music stand, so I was sort of playing the story I was reading, painting the scenes.’ Storytelling and the musical conjuring of images have become two of Dove’s greatest skills. He writes music that is open to the embrace and comprehension of the listener, that invites and intrigues. As he himself says, ‘I was a very late starter as a composer. I didn’t really start finishing pieces until I was about 30, by which age many great composers were nearly dead. There was a turning point when I entered into a collaboration with a friend, a mezzosoprano, and her partner was a painter who knew a dancer and we decided to do something that would use all of our skills. There were words — a setting of some Ted Hughes poems — and there was dance, and I think the whole thing about theatricality and music and words and singing started then. That was the first time I remember writing music that made me think, “This is me,” and I also knew that it would never be put on by the SPNM [The Society for the Promotion or, in the view of some, the Protection of New Music].’ At this stage, Dove was assistant chorus master at Glyndebourne, which came up with the idea of commissioning an opera from him for two schools in Rye. He leapt at, and well beyond, the idea, suggesting that instead of two schools he should write a piece for the entire town of Hastings, to be performed in the old ballroom at the end of the pier. It was an extraordinary and inspiring event, and he has gone on to write community pieces for Ashford (in a sports centre), Peterborough (in the cathedral and a shopping centre), the Hackney Empire and churches in Birmingham and Spitalfields.
‘Working with children is always extraordinary because they’re usually up for anything, but with adults who no longer get the chance to play, who may never have performed in their lives, the energy explodes on stage. When you’re dealing with an agerange from primary-school children to grannies — one of the choirs involved in the Spitalfields piece had an average age of 83! — and every sort of grouping from traditional CofE to a bunch of teenage girls in hijabs, you really do have a feeling that it’s a microcosm, an image of our society, celebrating itself in song.’ For Tobias and the Angel at the Young Vic, a professional cast of 14 was supported by 36 children between the ages of eight and 12, 47 adults from 18 to 80 and an offstage choir of 65 (including at least two members of the theatre’s administrative staff). All the onstage perform ers were recruited locally after a leaflet drop through Lambeth and Southwark invited people to come and have a go, and were cast after a series of auditions.
The Enchanted Pig will be different again, based this time on a Romanian folk tale with echoes of Beauty and the Beast but with tougher, more protracted ordeals for the hero and heroine to undergo. ‘There are eight people, playing quite a few characters between them. It’s a mixture of actors who can sing and opera singers who can act, which gives us quite a big musical range, from the operatic to music hall and pretty much everything in-between. There isn’t an obvious precedent for what we’ve made here; it’s not really a musical but it’s not really an opera either. It’s completely acoustic; no amplification for either singers or orchestra. I think some people will find it a very new thing, being used to musicals and suddenly experiencing the real power of the voice. We discovered with Tobias and the Angel that the theatre makes that possible. It’s dry enough so that you can hear the words clearly wherever you are but there’s just enough resonance so that it’s pleasant to hear.’ As Dove has proved time and again, operas don’t have to happen in opera houses. When his opera about Princess Diana, When She Died ... , was shown on Channel 4, the best part of a million people watched it, which may be nothing compared with the numbers who watch EastEnders but is equal to a sold-out performance every night at the London Coliseum for three years. ‘I know that most of those people weren’t turning on because it was a new opera by Jonathan Dove. They were turning on because it was about Diana — but they didn’t turn off. They found the story intelligible, they could hear what was being sung and they didn’t find the music repellent. And it was a story that had a real reason to be on television because it was an event which people apprehended through that medium.
‘The same is true of the first moon landing. It was an amazing historical moment that, curiously, hasn’t been dramatised that much. Usually, space travel is represented dramatically in terms of high adventure. Opera gives you the opportunity to change the time frame so that you can expand and dwell on something as astonishing as a man standing on the moon and seeing the earth, a view that had never been seen before. There are no limits apart from your own imagination for the music you can write to convey that. It’s new and unprecedented and colossal. Anything’s possible.’ What he has made possible this time will be revealed when Channel 4 broadcasts Man on the Moon at the end of the month.
I’d recommend flying with Dove — for him, the sky is nowhere near the limit.
The Enchanted Pig is at the Young Vic from 2 December. Man on the Moon will be broadcast on Channel 4 on 29 December.
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