Lessons in Love and Violence opera review – a masterful collaboration between composer and playwright
Not the most promising title for the anti-vaxxers “Time to lighten up and let’s all be cheery” brigade. On a Covid downer? Press the back button and find uplifting weekend enlightenment – there is plenty of it – from Reaction’s other talented scribblers. To date, George Benjamin has three operas on his scorecard, Into the Hill (2006), Written on Skin (2012) and Lessons in Love and Violence (2018). He must be absolute hell to live with. On his own admission, when he is in composing mode, he remains solitary for months at a time. And it takes about two years to pen an opera score these days. Mozart churned them out in weeks. Lessons in Love has recently been made available on mediciTV.
Into the Hill, a chamber work, is a riff on the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Written on Skin is uber gruesome. A rich land-owner – The Protector – pays a Boy (an artist) to create and illustrate a manuscript about his family. The Boy and the Protector’s wife Agnès are attracted to each other. Incensed by the reawakened independence of his wife, the Protector murders the Boy and forces Agnès unwittingly to eat his heart. Agnès then commits suicide. “Angels” provide a running comment throughout on the action. The work was widely acclaimed on its Royal Opera House debut in 2012.
Lessons followed in 2018, again at the Royal Opera House, but was criticised by some critics for being derivative. That will be the same critics who don’t pillory Mozart for drawing his Da Ponte series – favourites like Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, Cosi fan Tutti – from much the same compositional hat. Or Wagner for jumping in and out of the Rhine looking for that Godammed lost gold ring.
What’s with those 2018 negative waves? Benjamin and his librettist, for all three operas, Martin Crimp have brought to the stage a thrilling, powerful work, using the 16th century Christopher Marlowe play, The troublefome raigne and death of Edward II, as a template. There is a bit of lèse majesté with historical events – but let operatic licence rule.
The plot focuses on power struggles at the 14th century Edward’s court, but this is only a vehicle to transport us into a very modern-day version of events, focused on the interaction of political power and family love. Not only across characters but generations.
Hang on a minute! That’s not Edward II. Surely, it’s BoJo? And isn’t Mortimer, the monarch’s Svengali adviser – eventually defenestrated and consigned to the political wilderness – a dead ringer for Dominic Cummings? Here comes Queen Isabel, or is it Carrie Symonds? Kitchen cabinet maker with a vengeance, she is conspiring to send Cabinet Minister – oops! royal favourite – Gaveston to the boondocks for stabbing Mortimer in the theoretical back. That is before he gets shot in his all too real front.
In 2018 Benjamin could never have anticipated that the most useful God of all, Serendipity, would transform No10 into a medieval court seething with jealousy, recrimination and the lust for online revenge. If only Mortimer had enjoyed access to a substack.
The often-overlooked lesson the prescient composer and his librettist seek to deliver is simple. That the great world spins, which is a signature contemporary theme of others, such as Irish fiction author Colum McCann. Visceral human emotions change little. If we preen ourselves as being more self-controlled and enlightened than our medieval ancestors, we are self-deceivers.
Pacing is vital to Benjamin and his musical style assists the flow of dialogue with events unfolding at lightning speed. Drama, from Gaveston and Edward having sex – come on, the No10 analogy was never going to be perfect – to Mortimer having his eyes put out, then being shot by Edward’s young daughter as the stage goes to black.
That Ocean Barrington-Cook – no singing part – who played the twelve-year-old was a dead ringer for Greta Thunberg in pigtail mode, added a sense of topicality. An unforeseen bonus. That is the sort of cheap, trivial observation that I would never make. But, watch the opera, and you will understand it’s impossible to let the comparison pass quietly. It was LOL funny. Yet, probably completely unintended.
Here is a synopsis of the plot. The setting is a modish, luxury suite and there are no monarchical trappings. A trendy loft apartment in Clerkenwell, perhaps. The gold crown – the symbol of authority and easier to hand round than an orb and sceptre – is wheeled in and out of the action in a glass case atop a trolley and passed amongst the power-hungry. Fingered by each Edward wannabee. A great graphical reminder that power is mobile.
The opera is in two parts. In Scene 1, Mortimer condemns the King’s obsession with his lover, Gaveston. Mortimer holds himself out as a man of the people, worried about what’s going on up north, beyond the Red Wall. People are suffering from war and starvation. HS2 may make it 10 minutes quicker to reach their enclave of misery. It won’t cut it. Let’s cancel. The King strips Mortimer of his wealth and lands, and he is banished.
In Scene 2, Mortimer impresses on Isabel the King’s dereliction of his duty due to his obsession with Gaveston by confronting her with representatives of the suffering people, fresh off the delayed LNER service to Paddington. She agrees to support Mortimer’s campaign against Gaveston.
In Scene 3, Gaveston is arrested during an entertainment at the King’s residence and in Scene 4, The King rejects Isabel when he hears of Gaveston’s death at the hands of Mortimer’s heavies.
In Part 2, Scene 1, Isabel is now living with Mortimer. They groom the King’s son to assert his royalty by presenting him with a madman who believes he is the true King. The delusional unfortunate must face death in the interests of preserving the law. The King will be next.
In Scene 2, The King is allegedly mad, in prison. Mortimer persuades him to abdicate. Death, in the guise of Gaveston, claims the King. And then in Scene 3, the King’s son, having reluctantly succeeded to the throne, rejects Isabel and arranges the death of Mortimer, eyeball removal first, then having him shot by his sister.
Ocean Barrington-Cook does a great job as the Girl, looking disturbed, miserable and conflicted until she appears unexpectedly, with unshaking poise and aims to confront the blinded, bloodied Mortimer. Black automatic raised; there is no shot before the stage goes dark. But in the ears of the audience, it rings out loud and clear.
Lessons is unrelentingly serious. It is delivered in the manner of a Scandi noir detective series. It is chock full of atmosphere, heavy implication in every loaded line and at a filmic pace, with rapid cuts in the action. It is internalised. No aria attempts to speak directly to the audience.
Benjamin writes a score to match the action. His style is harmonic, but the ear is never allowed to settle. Huge crescendos, startling use of timpani, blaring wind passages and stretched range all hold the listener’s attention. He writes to suit singers’ voices and his scores plays to the musical strengths of the first cast to perform the work.
A good comparison is the famous Queen of the Night aria in The Magic Flute written by Mozart for his sister-in-law, Josepha Hofer. She had a remarkably agile voice, and Wolfgang decided to show her off. Similarly, if Benjamin knows a soprano has a favourite strong note, he will write to that. Awkward vocal passagio? He keeps well away. He is no composer martinet, insisting that it’s his score, or the highway.
The libretto comes first. Benjamin searched high and low, looking for a librettist. Well met, Martin Crimp and he have formed a fruitful partnership. He is spoken of as an “in yer face” dramatist, a descriptor Crimp rejects. I think it is more accurate to describe Lessons as confrontational. Yet, none of the shock horror is gratuitous. Well, maybe Mortimer’s plucked out eyeballs and bloodstained blindfold stray close to the cliff edge.
The Guardian critique in 2018, that the score overwhelmed and was derivative, is way wide of the mark. Benjamin makes a point of allowing the music to step back when dialogue takes over. I cannot recall listening to a better-modulated score. For those who love set-piece arias Lessons will prove a disappointment. But the work is a development of operatic tradition, not its destructor, nor composer’s “same old”.
The cast is impressive. Stéphane Degout as King perfected the role of the self-torturing monarch. M. Degout is a French baritone with a considerable – and well deserved – reputation, not only for operatic roles, but the performance of contemporary song cycles. The role of Edward, requiring much introspective monologue, called on all his talents.
The oleaginous Gaveston is Hungarian-Romanian Gyula Orendt. Canadian Barbara Hannigan holds down two jobs – conductor and soprano. I have yet to experience her conducting, but she portrays an aloof and frightening Queen Isabel.
The Boy – Edward’s son – tenor, Samuel Boden – had more of an acting than singing role but exudes anguish and self-doubt from start to finish, especially at the moment when cunning Mortimer places the crown on his reluctant head. Beyond the opera, in history, he, of course, morphs into Edward III, under Mortimer’s thumb.
Mortimer, cast as a nattily suited, bespectacled functionary, is masterfully performed by British tenor, Peter Hoare. No one would suspect him of surging ambition – or lust for Queen Isabel. In the pit, we were entertained by the composer. So, not much point in worrying about the accuracy of interpretation. The set design by Vicki Mortimer (perhaps a relation?) was un-flashily modern, and the complex movement was smoothly choreographed by Joseph Alford.
Lessons in Love and Violence is an excellent exemplar of the collaborative process in action. The unassuming Benjamin and Crimp have delivered a seamless, serious artwork. There is no pushing and shoving to claim principal authorship. So like our dear government today. It is a serious contribution to the modern canon.
If it is ever evening viewing for BoJo and Carrie in their oft-redecorated apartment at 10 Downing Street, the question must be, is a next-door neighbour at no 11, Rishi Sunak tuning in too? This is a Cabinet opera par excellence. Watch this space for Sir George’s next work, Lessons in Piffle and Bosh.