Birtwistle's new work is austere and challenges human nature head-on
The Minotaur
Royal Opera House, London WC2
It is the duty of the artist to confront, question and challenge man's nature, and Harrison Birtwistle does this profoundly with his latest work, The Minotaur. Since his earliest days he has conceived music as if it were Greek drama, a rude mix of ritual and allegory. There was no doubt at the end of this premiere that we had seen ourselves in the Minotaur, bestial beneath our civilised exterior, trapped within the complex labyrinth of our own fate. I emerged from the Royal Opera House on to rain-filled streets on opening night, stunned and purged by the experience.
The background briefly is this: King Minos of Crete has been cuckolded by a handsome white bull, which he was supposed to have sacrificed to Poseidon: instead his wife fell for the no doubt well-hung interloper, and the product of their union is the half-man, half-beast Minotaur. He/it is confined within a maze of tunnels known as the labyrinth and fed with regular sacrifices of Greek youths, the Innocents, sent from Athens on the mainland in black-sailed ships to recompense the Cretan king for the murder of his son.
Ariadne, the king's daughter, is waiting for one such shipment when we join the action. Theseus steps ashore determined to kill the beast, and Ariadne tries to seduce him. She sees in him a means of escape from the insularity of Crete. We see an attempt to shake off our barbaric, bestial origins.
Birtwistle's score heaves with savage, elemental beauty. The music groans from the depths and surges through the orchestra like new life. The dry squawk of an alto saxophone and woody brogue of a bassoon call up from the pit. Lurking there, too, is the unseen source of some ghostly, clanking tones - an amplified zither perhaps. There is no room below for the percussionists, who occupy boxes on either side of the auditorium. During the overture a video of the swelling sea, a powerful visual aid, plays on the curtain, and the driving rhythms under Antonio Pappano's explicit baton are pulse-quickening.
Christine Rice's Ariadne is fretful, her anxiety tangible in her dry, expressive soprano. It isn't misery she feels so much as a yearning as constant as "the unblinking moon" that dominates the set. Johan Reuter's Theseus has a beautiful, ringing baritone, perfectly suited to the muscular, innocent hero. His sinewy brawn is no match for Ariadne's wily brain. The thread idea was hers.
John Tomlinson's Minotaur is as vulnerable as a roaring bear chained to a post at a medieval fair, lured, baited and goaded with sharp sticks, prodded into an anger he cannot control, a victim of his own unique, awesome magnificence. He wears a wire bull's head throughout, and one sympathises as with the man in the iron mask. His dark bass-baritone has raw, earthy simplicity. As he careers, raging, between the walls of the labyrinth, with the grotesque, bloodlusty chorus looking on like an audience at a bullfight or gawpers at Bedlam, one knows only the most heartfelt compassion.
David Harsent's libretto lends itself aptly to Birtwistle's darkly complex music. There is little humour but a slow-burning intensity that shows itself in subtle repetitions of ideas and phrases. References to earth cake, cattle cake and blood cake suggest the searing heat as much as the sun disc on the cloudless backdrop. The special effect in the staging - the Minotaur, having learned civilising language for the first time, converses with his own hologram - is an eerie wonder. It matches the bodiless speaking-head illusion in Birtwistle's previous Covent Garden commission Gawain, nearly 20 years ago.
I once thought Birtwistle's music aggressive and antisocial. Now I count myself a convert. "Our ears change," the composer says. The challenge in his music is to be swept along by the primeval surge without fear of drowning. The confrontation is to be found in the Oedipal themes that drive the inspiration. The questions assert themselves continually. Isn't civilisation just a veneer over our crudest impulses? Birtwistle harnesses this and forges a pure, extreme beauty.
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