The two sorcerers of modern opera
They wrote a 21st-century masterpiece. Can George Benjamin and Martin Crimp do it again ? Rupert Christiansen reports
Opera has so often been a broad-brush business in which emotions are proclaimed in primary colours, but one element that makes the collaborations of composer George Benjamin and playwright Martin Crimp so alluring and discomfiting is their refusal to be upfront.
In both the small-scale Into the Little Hill (2006), and the full-length Written on Skin (2012) – widely considered to be the first truly great opera of the 21st century – Crimp’s spare and gnomic texts match Benjamin’s crystalline music to unfold fables full of eerie menace and suppressed violence that never quite come clean as to their significance. Critics and audiences alike across Europe and the US have been disturbed and intrigued and haunted by these modern masterpieces – but would anyone hazard a guess as to precisely what they imply?
Meeting this pair of sorcerers provides no answers, and they seem oddly chalk and cheese: Benjamin, 58, is cherubic, jovial and outgoing; Crimp is thin, quiet and hawk-eyed. Yet the chemistry between them bubbles, and the two of them claim to get along famously. “Martin has cast-iron integrity. He is someone I can absolutely trust. And I like him! We’re friends! He’s very funny!” chortles Benjamin. At which, Crimp merely smiles enigmatically.
They are now about to unveil their third theatrical collaboration, rather dauntingly entitled Lessons in Love and Violence, to be staged in a production that will open at Covent Garden before moving on to Amsterdam, Hamburg, Lyon, Chicago, Barcelona and Madrid. In light of their previous successes, expectations run very high, perhaps dangerously so.
Benjamin and Crimp met in 2005 through a mutual friend, the musicologist and viola da gamba player Laurence Dreyfus. At their first lunch at the Royal Festival Hall they knew nothing of each other’s work before they were match-made, but Dreyfus had a hunch that the two of them would get on.
“Laurence cleverly told me that Martin was a huge fan of my music,” Benjamin recalls. “In fact, the first time he had heard it was on a CD that Laurence had sent him the day before.”
In the course of his 25-year career as a composer, Benjamin had never written an opera. “It was something I had always wanted to do – I used to write them in my head when I was a teenager, and I’d always been searching for someone to collaborate with. I’d encountered so many people along the way – film-makers, poets, novelists – and nothing was ever sparked. When I met Martin, it was different. I fell in love with his writing: its strength and clarity and economy, and above all its strangeness – it’s never dogmatic or didactic, and the air of mystery that hangs over it electrified my imagination and seemed to invite my music in. I find composing far from easy and I need the second-by-second tension that Martin’s texts provide.”
“I’d had offers from musicians before, and I was never interested,” adds Crimp, a keen amateur harpsichordist but not at that point an opera aficionado. “All I can say is that I have no desire to work with any other composer. I wouldn’t write anything to be set to music unless it was his.”
Benjamin and Crimp consider themselves equally creative partners in their projects: even if operas are still attributed solely to the name of their composer in ordinary conversation, this pair aspire to be as inseparable as Gilbert and Sullivan and avoid the belittling term “libretto” (“little book”). “I prefer to think that I write a text for music,” says Crimp. “For me, opera is simply another a form of theatre.”
The two of them start work in discussion, whittling a vast number of themes and ideas down into a shortlist, for each item in which Crimp will then provide a sample scene. “If George is then particularly inspired by something, I’ll write a more substantial chunk and then leave him alone with it for a long while,” says Crimp. “And so it goes on.” Benjamin allows himself little leeway to stretch or snip at the material he is given. “I might repeat a word or phrase as I am setting it, but I would never change a syllable without consulting Martin. In any case, I seldom need to.” It’s a slow and meticulous process, in which both of them take special delight in honing the finest detail.
For Lessons in Love and Violence, the source is Christopher Marlowe’s 1594 play Edward II, supplemented by medieval chronicles of the story of that King’s ambiguous relationship with Piers Gaveston, his downfall at the hands of ambitious Baron Mortimer and the succession to the throne of his teenage son, who in the opera is the most obvious recipient of the eponymous lessons. As in so much of Crimp’s writing, there’s a mythic dimension to the narrative, a fascination with sadomasochistic power struggles and an almost Pinteresque sense of the unspoken menace that lurks behind our most innocuous assertions. Subtle in its psychology and equivocal in its implications, this is emphatically opera for grown-ups.
Despite Crimp’s distinctively gnomic prose style and the returning participation of Written on Skin’s director, Katie Mitchell, designer, and leading soprano Barbara Hannigan, Benjamin believes that the new opera will seem appreciably different from its predecessors. “I’ve tried to serve the drama with music that gives it its own distinctive tone, its own palette, its own density and way of moving,” he says. “There are many more male singers in the cast than in Written on Skin and that will affect the overall colour too. So I’m not afraid of the inevitable comparisons.”
Beyond the question of his own work, does Benjamin feel confident that opera has a robust future? “Yes, I do. It may have been though a bumpy patch in the Sixties and Seventies, but I wouldn’t have devoted so much of my life to it over the last 12 years had I felt that it was in its death throes.” But things have changed: although he is too pure an artist to yield to pleas to be “accessible”, Benjamin’s idiom has become markedly less acerbic since his teenage years when he studied in Leftist Paris under Messiaen, and Boulez’s academic extremism was all the rage among composers.
“That moment has passed. There are some things that one now tries to avoid – the intervals of a Major 7th or a Minor 9th, for example, which became so ubiquitous in contemporary music at one point that now I’ve virtually banned them. I also avoid singers with a heavy vibrato that can stop the words coming through and, for the same reason, I keep careful control over orchestral volume. Romantic composers such as Wagner and Strauss gave priority to the orchestra over the voice. They do that wonderfully and seductively. But I feel that in opera it should be
‘I’ve tried to serve the drama with music that gives it its own distinctive tone, its own palette, its own density’
the expressiveness of human beings that leads the drama, and ideally the audience shouldn’t need to look up at the surtitles.”
He is too diplomatic to offer his views of the American minimalist school, whose operas, such as Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, are regular hits. “I don’t know enough about them. When I’m composing I try not to listen to other people’s music, but I sense that what they do is very far from my own practice, so I really can’t comment.”
Likewise, Crimp doesn’t bother himself excessively with West End trends or what others are doing. “I just try to keep a healthy distance from institutions, without casting myself as a persecuted outsider.” He has no reason to complain: he has a following in France and Germany, and is not without honour in his own land – the National Theatre has commissioned a new work from him, due next year.
Neither he nor Benjamin buys into the 24/7 news culture. “I’m always looking for somewhere the imagination can run free,” he claims. Where better than opera? In Benjamin’s words, “it’s an art form that’s very good at confronting the darker aspects of existence”.
Lessons in Love and Violence is at the Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020 7304 4000), May 10-26