Duelling arias and piano gunfire:
South African composer Conrad Asman tries his hand at opera for the first time, turning to a topic close to
Dwuh! Dwuh! Dwuh! Three gunshots rang out, each separated from the previous one by a perfectly timed pause, as though they were metronome-measured beats. The sound reverberated through the large studio, caused hearts to shudder, heads to turn in shock.
Only they weren’t gunshots at all. The loud bangs were being made by José Dias, the Portugal-born Cape Town-based musical director, who was slamming down the lid of his Yamaha rehearsal piano, again and again. In response to the shocked expressions on the faces in the room, he explained that the thuds were stand-ins for whatever would be used to create the actual gunfire in the opera. His salvos of rehearsal dwuhs were for the singers to get used to the heart-thumping jolt that audiences would undoubtedly experience on the night.
The opera is Trial by Media, a new work by London-based South African composer Conrad Asman. It’s about the trial of Oscar Pistorius, the Paralympic athlete who shot and killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, on Valentine’s Day in 2013.
Co-directed by Fred Abrahamse and Marcel Meyer, the show is being produced as part of Cape Town Opera’s Shorts: A Festival of Pocket Operas, on at Artscape’s Arena theatre in Cape Town this month.
Gunshots notwithstanding, don’t expect from the opera a straight-up documentarytype reappraisal of the trial that so captivated the public imagination. Though the libretto by late author Schalk Schoombie deliberately quotes directly from court transcripts, it also plunders the online and social media commentary that surrounded the case, and it engages critically with the manner in which public opinion became part of the greater discourse about the trial.
Just as Schoombie’s narrative sets out to present multiple angles of the unfolding courtroom drama, Asman’s cutting-edge, frequently fiery score tries to capture a variety of perspectives, the mood and style of the music shifting throughout the opera as a way of embodying Nietzsche’s notion of truth as a construction of multiple viewpoints.
In contrast with the almost mathematical melodies used to underscore the procedural, forensic nature of the libretto in its most litigious moments, there are, for example, elements of waltz in the opera’s moments of levity – such as the lightness and joy evoked by Valentine’s Day, before the murder takes place. But, soon to come, there are the dissonant and jarring signatures of trauma and tragedy, plus those gunshots and the musical sparring between the two attorneys as they state their respective legal arguments in what comes across as a pair of duelling arias.
“In these scenes, it’s very calculated, very cold and unemotional,” says Asman of the technical manner in which the attorneys (bass-baritone Conroy Scott and tenor Tylor Lamani) plead their respective cases. “As their arguments build, they start to interrupt each other more and more, and the music grows increasingly agitated. It becomes quite fiery, culminating with this completely unrealistic battle of words and heightened emotions of these lawyers singing over one another. And the music takes the audience on that journey with them.”
Beyond the sometimes dry lyrics of the litigation aspect of the drama, there’s a
metaphysical element, too: Reeva Steenkamp’s spirit is present – and she not only watches but participates. Played by award-winning soprano Brittany Smith, Steenkamp’s apparition roams the stage, reflecting on her relationship with Pistorius, bringing some sense of how she might have felt about what was unfolding in the physical realm of the courtroom.
Although he doesn’t have synaesthesia – that ability some folks have to hear colours or see sounds – Asman says he does possess some “deeply internalised” ability to create a connection between sound and emotion.
“That’s what mainly drives me, and I can be quite neurotic about how I control that,” he says. “That’s what I love about composing: having the ability to harness music to make an audience feel something.”
Achieving that sort of control is a considerable process which, in order to create the Trial by Media score, began with “sussing out” the overall movement of the libretto, working line by line to establish the general mood and any development in each moment. Then he
created the vocal score, using the piano to lay down a kind of blueprint.
“There’s no real ‘right’ way to compose,” Asman says. “There’s no rule stating that you have to keep the audience in mind, or you must consider the performer… You can ultimately do whatever you like.”
Some composers dabble in “word painting”, he says. “It’s where, for example, if someone sings, ‘I love the smell of morning and butterflies in the air’, on butterflies you will hear all these butterfly-esque embellishments in the music as it attempts to emulate the composer’s idea of what a butterfly sounds like.
“For me, that can get very old very quickly, so I try not to do that. I like to think about the bigger mood of what’s being sung and I go from there, try to visualise the stage, think of how the singers are going to move around, consider where we need a duet or a solo, and where the chorus should be involved.”
Dias says the music is perfect for the subject matter. “When Reeva enters in a kind of dreamlike or heavenly state, or comes on in a flashback, the music is gentler. There’s even a