George Benjamin Lessons in Love and Violence - Musically brilliant, dramatically inert ?

George Benjamin at his writing desk. Photo :Matthew Lloyd, courtesy Askonas Holt

Musically brillliant, dramatically inert ? First thoughts on the world premiere of George Benjamin's Lessons in Love and Violence at the Royal Opera House.  Something wonderful happened when Bejnjamin teamed up with Martin Crimp the poet.  It's no accident that The Boy in Written on Skin was an illuminator, meticulously gilding and polishing his work to perfection.  And so he might have continued but for events unfolding around him.  A lot like George Benjamin himself !   Working with Martin Crimp unlocked something in Benjmain.  His first opera, Into the Little Hill was radically different from anything Benjamin - or indeed anyone else - had done before. It's an astonishing bizarre work, at once anarchic and disturbing.  As if arising straight from the subconcious it defies logic yet is highly intuitive and emotionally true. (Please read more here).  Written on Skin was more ambitious yet also slightly more conventional, following a vaguely realistic narrative.  Both operas deal with creativity and destruction, sexuality and repression, conflicts and pointless non-resolution.  In some ways, Lessons in Love and Violence continues the saga, through different characters    If anything, Benjamin's writing is even more assured and asssertive : daring crescendi, screaming chords, quirky combinations of instrumental colour that are more expressive than words alone could ever be.  But why does it feel like a remake of Written on Skin ?  

In Lessons in Love and Violence, we again have a dominant male figure bumbling his way ineptly through the lives of others, with horrific repercussions.  Based loosely on Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II, the opera reflects upon the relationship between Edward and Piers Gaveston,and the court around them. As The King  (Stéphane Degout) sings the first scena, ."Money... money...money", a symbol of something more in this intensely psychological  approach to the drama.   Fathers dictate what should happen to sons, kings dictate what should happen to subjects, sons become Kings themselves and so the cycle of love and violence continues.  The first scene is dominated by an enormous tank of (real) tropical fish, swimming aimlessly in an unnatural environment.  A metaphor for life in this kingdom ?  The tank must weigh several tons, and is being slowly rotated by stage machinery at the Royal Opera House, which has often been used extremely effectively.  But it is extraordinarily extravagant as stage prop. For such a relatively obvious statement, the expoense is way out of proportion.  But perhaps that is the point : ludicrously extreme solutions for problems that coul;d be resolved in other ways.  Crimp's libretto doesn't define what "entertainment" the Queen will witness at the end of the drama. But we know what is supposed to have happened to Piers Gaveston.  (and those who don't, will have nothing on which to vent their self righteous indignation).

Benjamin constructs Lessons in Love and Violence as a series of tableaux, divided by orchestral interludes which serve as "curtains" separating each section. These provide a formal structure,  and operate as commentary, expressing more through abstract music than can be said in the text.    Benjamin's writing in these interludes is even more impressive and sophisticated than in the scenes themselves, where he is constrained to some extent by the need to write for voice.   In the interludes, he creates astonishing orchestral colours, varied and tantalizingly elusive.   Low timbred brass and winds howl and growl, lines rising forth, grasping out into nothingness. Two off stage harps plus what sounds like a zither sing sad exotic songs.  At other moments strange sounds emerge, deliberately throwing you off track, like the twists in the plot.  With a story like this, you're supposed to feel ill at ease and uncertain.  Bows are beaten against wood, augmented by unpitched percussion, creating "primitive" effects, which intensify the rising sense of tension and violence as the narrative draws to its gruesome end.  Lessons in Love and Violence would work extremely well as symphony and might well be best heard semi-staged.  I would love to study it audio-only to better appreciate its depths. 

Therein, though, lies the problem.  Though the structure Benjamin uses is beautiful, like a series of miniature paintings in an illuminated album, it is also stylized and creates a sense of emotional disengagement.  It's as if we're observing specimens from a distance :the idea of fish in fish tanks, again. Nothing wrong with stylization, per se.  It was a feature of Greek tragedy, and is relevant to the wider implications of this tragedy, too. Thus the vocal lines are semi-abstract too, reflecting Crimp's background as poet. Some charcaters are fully fleshed, like The King (Stéphane Degout) and Gaveston (Gyula Orendt) and Mortimer (Peter Hoare), helped by very strong performances, by singers who are also instictive actors.  The role of Isabel, the Queen, might well have been written expressly to suit Barbara Hannigan, who sang The Woman in Written On Skin.  The part of Isabel  makes the most of Hannigan's ability to project coloratura lines. At times she sounded like a soprano clarinet with an extended range.  Something to marvel at, though the character itself isn't specially developed.  The Woman in Written on Skin at least found her identity. "I am Agnès" she cried, "I am not a child!"  Maybe Isabel is a plot device, a foil to the other characters.  Still, having Hannigan on board ensures the success of this opera,  and adds variety in an otherwise all-male cast. There are small roles for other women (one of them particulary striking)  and for younger singers, like Samuel Boden as the  King’s son.

Staging a stylized opera is a specialist genre in itself. Unlike verismo, where letting it all hang out is a good thing, in stylization, less can be more. At times, Lessons in Love and Violence seems to teeter on the edge of Pelléas et Mélisande.  It's as if the starving peasants Yniold spots outside the castle have breached its defences.  Benjamin's music broods and seethes with barely suppressed violence.   It can't be easy to reconcile stylization with  angry crowd scenes, but I'm not really sure about Katie Mitchell's direction. There are very good moments, such as when the younger actors move  in slow motion, suggesting the passage oif time. Almsot like a silent movie !(Movement director Joseph Alford). But there's a little too much stage decoartion for its own sake, large portraits, big beds, bookcases etc.  (designs by Vicki Mortimer).  Perhaps it's not Mitchell's fault. London audiences seem to need lots to look at so they don't have to think.  The enormous fish tank disappeared after the second section.  It almost stole the show, so removing it removed a distraction from Benjamin's drama in music.  Benjamin himself conducted  which made the music even more special. 

Pelléas et Mélisande Aix - dream but not a dream

Pelléas et Mélisande at Aix en Provence : orchestrally stunning and vocally top notch. But something was missing.  Debussy understood Maeterlinck's use of symbols : images deliberately created to unsettle and disorient, to deflect attention away from the surface to things unseen, lurking in the depths. Hence the references to towers and dizzying heights above the ground, and to silent ponds and open oceans, to caves and underground passages, to death and to constant danger.  Pelléas et Mélisande fascinates because it's elusive. This production will appeal to many because it's lovely to look at but it's not Pelléas et Mélisande, but Mélisande The Opera.

But who is  Mélisande, and why is she in Allemonde ?  Barbara Hannigan is such a celebrity these days that the whole production seems designed around her, which is fair enough. She has remarkable strengths, and it would be a waste not to make the most of them.  Hannigan's Mélisande is feisty, physical and extremely strong,  a manifestation of female sexuality, which is indeed, a part of the role : those towers and caves are there for a purpose !  Hannigan's looks also play a part, and she gets to disrobe and romp about in nude coloured undies an awful lot : hers is a body that works out a lot in the gym, and is almost androgynous, like Diana, the goddess of the hunt and of the moon, another of the many symbols in Maeterlinck's original play.  Mélisande as hunter and killer: the dramaturge, Martin Crimp is onto something more complex than Mélisande wan and wraithlike as a child of the moon.  Nearly ten years ago. at the Royal Opera House,  Angelika Kirchschlager portayed Mélisande in much the same way and was the saving grace of an unevenly focused production from Salzburg that was never revived.  But there's a lot more to Mélisande than this production suggests. I loved Martin Crimp's Into the Little Hill and Written on Skin for George Benjamin (more HERE and HERE), so I have a lot of respect for his insight into this opera. But this time the balance between poetic fantasy and literal narrative goes awry.

Pelléas et Mélisande isn't an opera in the usual sense. It's deliberately non-naturalistic, and the narrative non-literal.  Katie Mitchell directs the opera as if it were a dream sequence in which Mélisande acts out sexual fantasies. Hence the wedding gown in which she appears in the first scene.   But those who do know the opera would focus more on the greenery that surrounds the bedroom.  Golaud is out hunting, when he spots Mélisande  alone, in the middle of the forest, by a pool.  Anyone up to speed with mythology would recognize she's a variation of the eternal Loreley. And Loreleys don't wreak havoc. It's not personal.  Perhaps Mélisande loves Pelléas, but the libretto  fairly explicitly suggests that their relationship is more  a pact between innocents.  Stéphane Degout is probably the best Pelléas around these days, so wonderful in this role that it is a shame that he, too, is reduced to a prop in order to emphasize the role of Mélisande and her dreams.  There's a charge between them but it isn't necessarily sexual. The libretto suggests that Pelléas needs to get well away from Allemonde if he wants any sort of future, and Mélisande represents the world beyond, and the unknown.

Golaud gets jealous because he doesn't have the wit to understand that not all relationships are self gratification; things might not be the way he assumes.  Laurent Naouri has done Golaud so often that he's brilliant, authoritative yet also sympathetic, much too complex a personality to be a mere figment of Mélisande's imagination.  When Golaud and Pelléas descend into the suffocating caves beneath the castle, they are undergoing psychological trauma.  We know from the script that the sea lies beyond, but in this production Degout and Naouri are trapped in the bowels of the castle.  The staircase, nonetheless is a good visual image, for it's twisted, rickety and possibly unsafe, so the set makes the point quite effectively. For Pelléas, there is no escape.


Allemonde is not so much a castle as a state of mind: It's cut off from its hinterland, the peasants are starving and roaming about in revolt, Yniold is terrified when he ventures out to play. None of which we see in this production, though  Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra are brilliant at creating non-visual imagery, for those in the audience who pay attention to music.  Under Salonen, the orchestra has developed way beyond the usual parameters of a symphony orchestra. The challenge of opera serves them well. This was a performance so vivid and impassioned that I was glad to listen, since the playing spoke much more expressively than the staging.  Degout and Naouri have the parts so fully characterized that they acted properly, their bodies extensions of their voices.  Mitchell directed Hannigan to move in trance-like  stylization, valid enough in theory, but deadening in practice. The silly eyeliner Hannigan had to wear didn't help, either, suggesting slut rather than half-human vixen.

Franz Josef Selig sang an excellent, virile Arkel,  and Sylvie Brunet-Gruppuso sang a nicely down to earth Geneviève, both of them common sense counterfoils that emphasised the bizarre nature of this Mélisande's dream world.  Altogether a very good Pelléas et Mélisande despite the one-dimensional interpretation and over-emphasis on Hannigan's thing for nudity which is wearing thin these days. She can sing, so she really doesn't need to make an exhibition.  The dream concept might be valid but it doesn't do the opera, and other singers, justice.  Less sex, please, but more mystery.

See also the review in Opera Today by Michael Milenski.

"I'm a creative animal" - Barbara Hannigan

"I'm a creative animal" says Barbara Hannigan. Watch the documentary (51 minutes) from SRF, Switzerland  HERE.