Performance

Commissioned by the Cambridge Music Festival with funds from the R.V.W. Foundation, performed by the New Cambridge Opera Group, November. Based on three revue sketches by Harold Pinter (c.25 mins.)

Act 1sample

Act 2 sample

Act 3 sample

Act 3 (later excerpt) sample

Broken lines

I had always admired the works of modern British playwrights (and especially those of Harold Pinter), so when I was asked to write a twenty-minute chamber opera is seemed obvious to me that I should use material from this genre in some way. However, most texts that I had in mind were far too long and complex to shoehorn into the given time span, and I had no wish to create libretti that were mere skeletal shadows of works that were probably best left untouched anyway. I was for this reason that I decided to base the work on the revue sketch Trouble in the Works, and several individual scenes from The Hothouse, both by Harold Pinter: each no more than four pages long, with a rhythm that jumped off the page at you, they were exactly what I had been looking for, and needed only very minor alterations. The excerpts from Pinter were so ‘musical’ in their own right that they provided with me with a ready made structure to compose to. For instance, in the first movement (adapted from Trouble in the Works) where Wills reports to his boss, Mr. Fibbs, that the workers have ‘taken a turn’ against the products they are making, (which include such well-known items as ‘hemi-unibal-spherical-rod-ends’ and ‘high-speed-taper-shank-spiral-flute-reamers’!) the quick-fire conversation, with its accelerating speed and shortening of lines (ending up with a maniacal ping-ponging of monosyllables), was exactly analogous to the way that I would have created a musical climax. Similarly, the long monologues of ‘the woman’ in Movement Two (taken from The Hothouse) screamed ‘big slushy aria’, and the thin veneer of friendliness that Miss Piffs displays in the last movement gave me a perfect excuse to indulge in overtly triadic writing (whose diatonicism is soon soured like her attitude) – something that I would have been too inhibited to do in any ‘pure’ music. Perhaps what inspired me most was my dislike for all the characters, or more accurately, my delight in their nastiness (or even downright evil in some cases). The first movement gives us Mr. Fibbs, a pompously confident but hopelessly incompetent boss, and Wills, a supposedly concerned worker who (perhaps not-so-) secretly revels in subjecting his senior to as much mental anguish as he possibly can. Movement Two presents us with an arrogant chauvinist, a very boring and bored man, and a woman who, however touching and sincere, is annoyingly blind to reality. Finally, and possible most bizarrely, we meet a spineless young man and a psychopathic secretary… This is not to say that I was never fooled by my characters: on one level it helped my greatly during composition to be oblivious of their real intentions. While I was composing the woman’s monologue in Movement Two I also inhabited her world, swanning around in a smog of idealistic romanticism, only wondering afterwards how she could be so stupid as not to see the true colours of the creep about whom she was eulogising. Although the three excerpts are unrelated in subject matter, they do seem to share a common theme: in none of the movements are people able to understand each other properly – their lines of communication are all incurably broken. The inhabitants of the three worlds ignore each other, misunderstand each other, and generally fail at anything positive they want to achieve: it’s highly improbable that the woman will ever get any attention from the man, and even less likely that young Mr. Lamb (in movement three) will get to job as a physicist for which he has come to be interviewed. Each excerpt could be described as darkly humorous, though the music tries to take the words very seriously: I hope the ‘dark’ is more apparent then the humour in the musical realisation.