Bill Jamieson: Bliss of a happy operatic ending

Published on Thursday 2 September 2010 14:54

A traditionalist until now, this new contemporary opera has changed my views, writes Bill Jamieson

• The orchestration and instrumentation in contemporary opera Bliss is both inventive and lyricalPicture: Ian Rutherford

It's bliss, but not as we know it. Australian composer Brett Dean's new opera, based on the book by Peter Carey, had its European premiere in Edinburgh last night. Quite why it has been scheduled so late in the festival programme so that it cannot build up 'word of mouth' recommendation is a mystery, because I believe it to be one of the most brilliant, inventive and compelling events this year.

Now that is a big claim for contemporary opera - an art form that has struggled to break out from a specialist niche audience and which has failed to capture a more prominent place in our cultural conversation. Who is listening to new opera, exactly? And why should we?

From its opening scene, Bliss is a descent into a surreal hell. Harry Joy, a successful advertising executive, is struck down with a heart attack in the middle of a party to celebrate his business acumen and life success. He revives to discover that his life, far from being "successful", is a dysfunctional nightmare: a treacherous buddy, an unfaithful wife, a drug addled daughter and clients whose products cause cancer. The plot has infidelity, drug addiction, a hippie hooker, a lunatic asylum, foul language, a suicide bombing, and oh, I almost forgot, sister-on-brother fellatio on stage. Ho-hum. I really must get out more.

Arguably most offensive for opera traditionalists is that this search for redemption has an upbeat ending. There is no lingering 20 minute death scene for the principal diva, or a climactic plunge off the ramparts. A happy ending in opera? Whatever next? How much safer it would have been to have filled the 1,800 seater Festival Theatre with a traditional Traviata or Rigoletto with their show-stopping arias. The reassuring familiarity mingles with memories of performances in younger days. With fresh interpretation you can see a favourite opera umpteen times and on each occasion still hear something new. And the quest for redemption, the central theme of all great drama, grows more insistent with the years.

Yet opera audiences across America and Europe have never been more divided - between the solid core of late middle-aged regulars without whom many houses would be driven to closure, and the younger, numerically smaller avant-garde keen to see new and innovative work.

The older audience cannot understand why 'producer opera' has been allowed to run amok through the repertoire, setting the great operas in dentists' waiting rooms, urinals and East European dereliction. It cannot fathom why it is now routinely bombarded with offensive language, gratuitous sex and disturbing violence. It fears the reign of the ‘new producers' is driving audiences away and killing opera.

The avant-garde counters that traditional opera is already dead, or close to it. You only need to look at the numbers in the stalls adjusting their hearing aids as the conductor arrives to see how close we are. You can't just go on banging out age-old productions of La Boheme, creatively lifeless and interpretatively dead.

In this raging war I have tended to side with the traditionalists, aghast at the appearance of Wotan done up as a Lollipop Man and great stage settings abandoned for what looks like the broken bits returns desk at IKEA. Unlike the critics, I have paid full whack prices for my tickets - and, for me, less is most definitely not more.

I have booed more productions at the Royal Opera House than I have had interval sandwiches, and I note with pleasure this audience feedback continues. A recent new production of Tosca at the New York Met was greeted with boos, and a fresh production of Tristan & Isolde at Covent Garden, set on a bare stage and what seemed to be office furniture out of a Staples catalogue, fared no better.

What future can there be in this? Happily I can report that in contemporary opera there is one. For extreme traditionalists to maintain that the opera heyday of the late 19th century should be preserved is to set at nought the work of Strauss, Stravinsky, Benjamin Britten, Kurt Weill, Sondheim, Philip Glass and many others.

In America arts companies are reaching out to contemporary opera to help save opera houses now dying on their feet. New productions are not just reaching audiences that have never previously been to opera, but also winning over conservatives keen to hear something different. The solid middle ‘that does not know much about opera but knows what it likes' often find that what they do like can surprise them. That the themes and plots are of direct contemporary relevance certainly helps. Discordant it may be. But dissonance is central to the way we live now.

But that in itself does not make the case for contemporary opera. That case at heart rests on the enduring breadth and depth of music drama. It is not just that music is a means of communicating mood or setting, or amplifying what the characters are saying, but what they are experiencing within themselves.

Music puts audiences directly in touch with what the characters on stage are feeling. It opens up unconscious or sub-conscious dramatic motivation. It is a critical point that Wagner articulated where others had innately understood and which he put into such powerful and enduring effect. Music is not incidental, but integral to the drama and our understanding of it.

And this is where Bliss scores so highly. Its appeal for me lay in its brilliant and innovative orchestration. The very dissonance that traditionalists find hard to stomach is here worked with superlative lyricism and craftsmanship.

Grieve not for the absence of the show-stopping aria, for the aria and rich coloratura is in the orchestra pit. That colouring owes much to instrumentation that includes, in addition to brass and timpani, a harp, a xylophone, whirly tube (electronic), gongs, a seed rattle, cowbell, police whistle, duck call and others. For a music teacher seeking to show students what contemporary music can offer in range and inventiveness, I can think of no better example.

This is not to belittle the insightful libretto of Amanda Holden (‘a life in hell can aspire to bliss'), the assured command of Peter Coleman-Wright as Harry, and the dramatic performance of Merlyn Quaife as his menacingly ambitious wife. As for the creative brilliance of the LED stage lighting, I have seldom seen better.

But it is without doubt the orchestration that steals this show. Brett Dean's score breezes in with all the freshness and vitality of Australian surf. Shame on the Festival that this show did not open in the first week, enabling it to gain a greater audience.

For Bliss, with its message to hang on to our dreams, is an experience that engages and enriches beyond measure. After this, you cannot say that opera is "dead". Rather, it speaks to us with greater relevance, clarity and inventiveness than ever.