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Shaping Images Into Sound in the Second Mrs Kong

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Shaping Images Into Sound in the Second Mrs Kong Cambridge Opera Journal http://journals.cambridge.org/OPR Additional services for Cambridge Opera Journal: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here ‘A face like music’: Shaping images into sound in The Second Mrs Kong DAVID BEARD Cambridge Opera Journal / Volume 18 / Issue 03 / November 2006, pp 273 - 300 DOI: 10.1017/S0954586706002205, Published online: 19 January 2007 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0954586706002205 How to cite this article: DAVID BEARD (2006). ‘A face like music’: Shaping images into sound in The Second Mrs Kong. Cambridge Opera Journal, 18, pp 273-300 doi:10.1017/S0954586706002205 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/OPR, IP address: 131.251.254.13 on 21 Feb 2014 Cambridge Opera Journal, 18, 3, 273–300 2006 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0954586706002205 ‘A face like music’: Shaping images into sound in The Second Mrs Kong DAVID BEARD Abstract: Premièred at Glyndebourne in October 1994 and subsequently performed in the UK, Austria, Germany and Holland, The Second Mrs Kong was the result of a collaboration between the American writer Russell Hoban and British composer Harrison Birtwistle. The opera’s reception has tended to emphasise the disparity between Hoban’s diverse and eclectic interests, which emerge not only in the libretto but also in his novels and essays, and Birtwistle’s more introspective and linear approach. Possible connections between Hoban’s aesthetics and Birtwistle’s music have generally been disregarded. I argue, however, that the opera’s main aesthetic concerns – namely, the mediation of images through ideas and the workings of image-identification in diverse media – are shaped by a productive exchange between librettist and composer. The clearest expression of this interaction is the love between Kong, who embodies ‘the idea of’ King Kong from the 1933 RKO film, and Pearl, a character drawn from Vermeer’s iconic painting Girl with a Pearl Earring. The representation of these visual icons in The Second Mrs Kong is inflected by Birtwistle’s own views on images, by his attempts to find musical analogues for visual techniques, as revealed especially in his sketches, and by his lively engagement with Hoban’s ideas. Hoban’s images In several novels that predate his libretto for The Second Mrs Kong (1994), American writer Russell Hoban showed a vivid interest in iconic images and in the ways such images inspire identification from viewers.1 Such concerns were evidently upper- most in his mind when, in 1993, he began work on the text of the opera for Harrison Birtwistle. This interest is clearly illustrated by the work’s focus on ‘Pearl’, the now-iconic subject of Vermeer’s painting Girl with a Pearl Earring, and the equally iconic Kong, the protagonist of the 1933 RKO film King Kong. The appeal of such subjects resided not only in their representation of the ‘beauty and the beast’ dichotomy central to the original King Kong film, but also in their potential to illustrate how visual images function, and the ways consumers of culture respond to them.2 Pearl is now a postcard image, reproduced innumerable times and available in gift shops around the world and on the Internet. Similarly, Kong’s image continues to be replicated, most recently in Peter Jackson’s 2006 remake of the original film. But Kong differs from Pearl by virtue both of his filmic, and therefore narrative, presence, and in the almost mythical status he has acquired since 1933. 1 Some ideas in this article were first presented at a BBC Study Day on The Second Mrs Kong held at the Royal Festival Hall, London, in November 2004. I would like to thank Jonathan Cross and Ann McKay at the BBC Symphony Orchestra for inviting me to speak on that occasion. I am also grateful to Cardiff University for generous financial support, and to Danijela{ Spiric´-Beard for her assistance with preparing the music examples. 2 ‘It was beauty killed the beast’ are the last words uttered in the original King Kong; this formulation, also used in the original advertising for the film, returns in various forms throughout the opera. 274 David Beard The two images are therefore likely to elicit different responses from viewers. While Pearl may prompt personal thoughts and intimate feelings not specifically connected to a narrative, Kong will probably evoke an epic story of unrequited love, loneliness and death.3 The Second Mrs Kong opens in The World of Shadows where an eclectic array of imaginary people (fictional and mythical figures from different media and times) is assembled: they are all dead. Ferrying the dead to this world is Anubis, the jackal-headed god from Egyptian mythology, who indulges each of the occupants of his world by allowing them to re-live certain moments from their past. The central scene in Act I re-enacts the moment when Vermeer painted Pearl: in this scene Pearl first becomes aware of Kong’s existence when she hears his voice emerging from the Mirror that Vermeer asks her to use. We are then introduced to Kong, who appears as a rather forlorn and anxious character, searching for the meaning of his existence and denying his own death. He has heard Pearl through the Mirror and his desire is aroused. Meanwhile, now living in ‘a stockbroker’s high-tech penthouse’, Pearl surfs television and video selections. Encountering an excerpt from the 1933 King Kong film, she is inspired to reach Kong via the Internet and their relationship unfolds. Assisted by Orpheus, Kong decides to return to the World of the Living to find Pearl. Act II begins with Kong and Orpheus leaving the World of Shadows. During their journey they are distracted by four female temptations, one of whom tears off Orpheus’s head. When Kong and the Head of Orpheus arrive at the entrance to the World of the Living, Kong is tested once more, this time by the Sphinx, Madam Lena. Surviving these trials, Kong and Orpheus arrive in ‘a bad part of town’ via a manhole cover. While telephoning Pearl to ask for her address, Kong and the Head of Orpheus are set upon by Kong’s nemesis, Death of Kong (played by Anubis). Kong wins the fight and rushes to meet Pearl, who awaits his arrival nervously. Despite their declarations of love, however, the couple are unable to touch, the Mirror informing them that theirs is a love ‘that cannot be fulfilled’.4 The opera dissolves into a stream of voices and echoes, joined by Orpheus and Eurydice, as well as other characters for whom love has proved illusory. The libretto for The Second Mrs Kong is shaped by Hoban’s personal, intense and ongoing response to both the original King Kong film and the Orpheus myth, evident in his novels Turtle Diary (1975) and The Medusa Frequency (1987), as well as his collection of essays The Moment Under the Moment (1993). As Hoban comments in Turtle Diary, the original King Kong film teems with reflected images of heads, faces and physiognomic responses to dramatic events, most arrestingly the representation of Fay Wray’s scream, first rehearsed on a boat sailing to Skull Island and then seen 3 Since the appearance of Tracy Chevalier’s novel Girl with a Pearl Earring (London, 2003) and the eponymous film directed by Peter Webber (2004), however, it is possible that Pearl’s image may also evoke a narrative for certain viewers. 4 Russell Hoban, The Second Mrs Kong: An Original Opera Text (London, 1994), 34. All quotations from the libretto are from this edition, indicated by a page number in brackets. ‘A face like music’: Shaping images into sound in The Second Mrs Kong 275 ‘for real’ when she is taken away by Kong.5 In the opera Orpheus’s head is severed from his body and carried by Kong from the World of Shadows into the World of the Living, while Kong and the audience view selected moments from the film: the first of these screenings focuses on Kong’s face as it confronts an approaching train, a sight that terrifies the train’s driver. Hoban has also often been concerned with the difficulty of fixing a visual image in the mind. In The Medusa Frequency, for example, Hoban construes the Orpheus myth in terms of the human mind’s inability to preserve an event or mental image (such as the loss of Eurydice); he terms the resulting gap ‘the indeterminacy of being’, a discontinuity in which an idea or person reappears while progressively becoming more vague. In this novel, for example, the central character associates spherical objects with recurring but unstable impres- sions of the head of Orpheus.6 In The Second Mrs Kong, however, images often originate in voice and imagination. Faces begin as imagined rather than seen. Despite their larger-than-life visual manifestations, Kong and Pearl are initially introduced to one another through word alone. Unable to see one another, they communicate at first through the mind of Vermeer, who has temporarily brought Pearl into the World of Shadows where Kong resides. This distance is maintained in the Internet dating scene (Act I scene 3), during which Kong mouths the familiar operatic trope of the voice as love object, whereby the characters fall in love with one another’s voices: ‘In these words I hear the voice of Beauty and I am afraid’ (18). Kong’s singing voice, which breathes life back into the Kong that we saw die at the end of the film, also allows the development of love requited (in the original film Kong’s love remained unrequited).
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