Opera
Nicholas Maw
Rodney Milnes
Although he is better known as a composer for the concert hall, mostly of vocal pieces, opera holds an irresistible fascination for Maw. 'I enjoy the collaboration element, the feeling of being involved in a large communal project instead of being turned in on myself, of thinking"Does what I am writing mean anything to anyone else?".' That seems to dispose of the miniaturist school of closet-opera-composers. Maw sees opera as the most public musical form. 'The audience,' he maintains, 'is the central issue. The composer is making a large-scale public statement. If opera is to survive, it has to be in the public arena and composers have got to come to terms with that. A public statement—that is the aesthetic of the thing. Even if it's done on an intimate scale, a work must contain large-scale gestures. A lot of contemporary music (and art generally) is concerned with an adjectival as opposed to a substantive function; so much of it describes green or blue, but no object or noun. If you are going to work in music, then you are forced to write theses about nouns. This is one reason for the decline of large-scale operatic or symphonic works—not so much the lack of something to say as the means of saying it. Many feel that such artefacts are hangovers from the nineteenth century, which they want nothing whatever to do with. I do want to have something to do with them, to get plugged in to them and come to terms with them. That is the only viable way forward. I am very interested in large statements.
'Bluntly, this means writing "tunes", and all that that implies. The melodic paragraph is fundamental to the musical act: you cannot get away from that. It is both the most satisfactory and the most subtle way of defining a chunk of musical time. It becomes more than itself, implies so much more than is on the page—the situation, the feelings of characters, and transforms them into the heirarchical language of music. You can't analyse the effect. This kind of art is dealing in plain speaking, but plain speaking of extreme complexity.'
Maw has an open relationship with tradition. He does not reject the past for the sake of rejection, but garners strength from old forms—the operatic ensemble, for instance, which fascinates him in that it is 'a uniquely operatic effect that is totally false yet totally true, and can be used with devastating force. It externalises what is going on in people's minds at any given moment, and pushes the action forward economically and quickly. The old set forms can do certain things better than anything that has replaced them.' At the same time he sees the lack of a specifically British operatic tradition as a liberation. 'If I were German or Italian, it would be far more difficult to write operas. We have the advantage of starting with a clean sheet. If you are German, you simply cannot he traditional for political and aesthetic reasons.'
Maw's next opera, commissioned with Gulbenkian funds by the English National Opera, is a setting of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. This extraordinary picaresque novel describes the visit of the devil, named Woland, to Moscow in the 'thirties and the tragi-comic effect on what Maw calls the impostors, hypocrites and arselickers in communist literary society of that time—`and for communist society, read any society'. Bulgakov was for some time writerin-residence at the Moscow Arts Theatre, and Stanislavsky's shabby treatment of him is ample justification for his somewhat paranoid self-portrait as the Master, whose novel about Christ's passion seen from the point of view of Pilate lands him in hot water with the literary establishment. It was not so much what Maw calls 'the mind-cleansing combination of black comedy and deep seriousness' in the novel, nor the ideas beneath the surface, nor the opportunities for a kaleidoscopic juxtaposition of scenes and for musical satire, but the characters that attracted him to the work: Woland himself, 'the face of evil that does forever good', the persecuted Master, the enigmatic, devoted Margarita, Woland's entourage (which includes a huge black cat) and the exquisitely delineated literary frauds and apparatniks. For Maw, the premier plan is always the characters. 'I am not interested in writing opera for musical reasons. For me, opera starts from characters of flesh and blood. You can begin with a disembodied idea, but it must be presented in human terms. I know I am in a minority. Most composers will write a mystical parable, or a political parable, or write about "the artist in society". I must have intensely human types, acted and sung by human beings.' There are surely worse minorities to be in than one that holds that operas are to be played to audiences—'the central issue' remember—who will probably consist of beings no more or less human than the characters on the stage or the composer who created them. Janacek lives.
The adaptation of The Master—or Woland as Maw will entitle the opera—has not been easy. Nor was the writing of The Rising, which was done in a hurry, with Maw setting one act without knowing precisely what was going to happen in the next. He is determined to fix the libretto of Woland before he writes a note. 'The music is about the drama, but is filtered through another medium: words. Some composers have an instinct about the right music, but not about the right words.' He can say that again. 'Once you have got the right words, the setting presents no great problem.'
There are two librettists for Woland. Michael Glenny, who translated the novel from the Russian and worked vainly on a dramatisation until he realised that it could only work as an opera, tried to get in touch with Maw at precisely the same moment that Maw fell head-over-heels for the novel and tried to get in touch with its translator. The structure, then, is Glenny's; Hugh Whitemore has written the actual words. The text is at first-draft stage, and Maw feels it may have to go through many more. And here is the whole ghastly problem. He has had the opera in his mind for two or three years. It will take another two or three years at the very least to complete it. The Rising was made possible by a post at Trinity Cambridge as Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts. The commission fee for Woland was useful and acceptable all those years ago. Maw can make more money out of half a dozen vocal or orchestral pieces that would take less than half the time to write.
Perhaps the projected re-productions of his first works will recharge his engines and fill his pockets. Otherwise, we shall have to wait a long time for Woland. That prospect fills me with even darker thoughts about some other recipients of public money, not to mention some of the ill-crafted, introverted new operas that have been mounted. All that is needed to buy Maw's time to finish an opera of almost guaranteed fascination and accomplishment is a sum about a tenth of that for a new production of Balk in Maschera, or a hundredth of one rivet on Concorde. And it is important, because the crucial thing about Maw is that he writes operas in order to communicate with audiences, and not to fulfil some deeply felt and deeply irrelevant personal need. There are too few composers of whom you can say that.
This concludes the first essay in a series devoted to English opera composers
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