Judith Bingham

The Secret Garden (2004)

This 2004 Prom commission for the BBC Symphony Chorus was inspired by a conversation with its dedicatees, Elaine and Christopher Perry, about the Masaccio fresco of Adam and Eve, and its exploration of shame. It made me wonder what the Garden of Eden was like after Adam and Eve left – did God still walk there in the evening, alone and disappointed? Did it become an enclosed world where shame did not exist, a protected and perfect space? In the research and reading that followed, I was taken with the Swedish botanist Linnaeus’s sexual descriptions of plants and their behaviour:

The flowers’ leaves serve as bridal beds which the Creator has so gloriously adorned with such noble bed curtains and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much the greater solemnity.

And I was very taken with the discovery that there is a place in Iraq, Qurna, where locals believe the Garden of Eden stood. The Tree of Knowledge, or Adam Tree, was bombed in the Iran-Iraq War, and the final part of the piece wonders how nature – paradise - would have renewed itself once the human influence had left. Finally, I found the central image for the piece in the BBC TV series, ‘The Private World of Plants’ - the extraordinary synergy that exists between moths and orchids.

This is meant to be a magical and intriguing piece. It has a Christian framework with its opening and closing quotations from Genesis and Matthew, and in the second and third movements the Star of Bethlehem orchid rises like a prophecy. In this way it could be seen as a piece about redemption and forgiveness. But the piece also seems to wonder whether the world is better off without humans, and that, should humans ever cease to exist, Paradise would very soon re-establish itself, in a world without blame, denial, or shame. The poem, which I wrote myself, includes many Latin names of plants and moths, and this led to the subtitle of Botanical Fantasy.

The eighteenth-century world of Linnaeus made me choose a French Suite as the form, and there are five movements: Ouverture, Air de Musette, Vol de Nuit, Entr’acte and Air de Nuit. I knew that I was writing for the newly restored Albert Hall organ, and also for Thomas Trotter, so the organ has a virtuosic and highly-coloured rôle to play. An extended solo at the end of the third movement describes the synergy between plants and insects.

Judith Bingham

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