Presentness and the Past in Contemporary British Opera

Open Research Online The Open University’s repository of research publications and other research outputs Presentness and the past in contemporary British opera Book Section How to cite: Kolassa, Alexander (2018). Presentness and the past in contemporary British opera. In: Cook, James; Kolassa, Alexander and Whittaker, Adam eds. Recomposing the Past: Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen. Ashgate Screen Music Series. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, pp. 155–173. For guidance on citations see FAQs. c [not recorded] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Version: Accepted Manuscript Link(s) to article on publisher’s website: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315268255/chapters/10.4324/9781315268255-10 Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. oro.open.ac.uk Chapter 9 Presentness and the past in contemporary British opera Alexander Kolassa Introduction: modernism and the distant past Medievalism is a prominent feature of British music, among both pre- and post-war so-called modernist composers. Speaking about the music of Harrison Birtwistle—but in such a way that it could easily be applied to his contemporaries—Michael Hall has summarised a style which is the result of a ‘combination of medieval[…] and twentieth-century interests’ (1984, p. 9); indeed, Birtwistle’s engagement with these techniques is already well documented.1 This historicist fixation of a peculiarly ‘medieval’, or at least ‘early’, sort is a preoccupation Birtwistle is known to have shared with Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr, composers with whom he studied in Manchester in the 1950s. Collectively, these composers formed part of a small group who set the agenda for an increasingly radical post-war British new music to come. That they did so during a time of a folk and early music revival has, however, been mostly overlooked in scholarship on the subject to date. Against the backdrop of a historical context usually downplayed when discussing modernist music, this chapter will examine two examples of the creative use of the musical past in British operas: Taverner (1970) by Peter Maxwell Davies and Arianna (1995) by Alexander Goehr. These two works bookend a post-war moment in British music, the first representing a relatively early example of the Manchester School’s cultural import and influence (and, even, ability to shock), while the second, written 25 years later and in the final years of the twentieth century, appears as something wholly institutional and institutionalised. Despite their composers’ proximity, the works present contrasting stylistic approaches in (but not limited to) their treatment of the past. The historical trajectory connecting them reflects in interesting ways the interconnected destinies of early music performance practitioners providing valuable insight into a historically British medievalist trend (or trends), and illuminating—through the medium of early music—the role that modernist music has played in British post-war cultural life. More broadly, I hope here to engage with the somewhat poetical notion that the very old can be, and so often has been, used to say something new, especially in musical modernism; the chronologically disruptive usage of anachronism is a particular feature worthy of attention here. Ultimately, I hope not only to enrich our understanding of the operas in question but to illuminate some of the ways in which artists do, and have, engaged with the past across disciplinary and generic boundaries. * * * The idea that the new might be in some way found, or invoked, through a synergy of the present with a (distant) past is not without precedent in the context of artistic modernism: which is to say, the artistic response to modernity characterised by, among many other things, formal innovation and progress-orientated ideals. A sort of call to arms for the early twentieth-century modernist aesthete, Ezra Pound’s famous 1928 injunction to ‘Make it New’ is—somewhat contradictorily—the product of a sustaining fascination with the Occitan troubadour tradition, Dante, and others. If modernism signals, as it is also often said to, a historical break with what went before, what is the ‘it’ in Pound’s proclamation exactly if not an object of a non-contiguous past; and, moreover, through what process might it (and indeed why should it) be made new? To consider only the beginnings of early twentieth-century musical modernism, prominent examples of composers finding inspiration in early music spring to mind: Webern’s own innovations could reasonably be said, for example, to have been partially inspired by his doctoral studies on the music of Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac. Stravinsky, too, drew tirelessly from the past and in all kinds of ways: be that in his neoclassical works, in the primitivistic medievalism of Rite of Spring and Les Noces, or in his (re)discovery of Gesualdo and the stylistic shift this signalled for his career.2 This is a theme that, we will see, is pursued later in the century. What, then, might we say of the appeal that early music seems to have had for the modernist artist or composer? Common wisdom dictates that modernism observed, from the beginning, that the well-trodden harmonic teleology of the tonal tradition (and the institutions that supported it) needed rejecting in some way. Early music, similarly marginal, must have had a sort of subversive potential, then; all the while, it still promised some historical continuity.3 Perhaps the types of compositional processes, far removed from the peculiarly western (teleo)logic of functional harmony, and owing more to extra-musical organising principles like shape and proportion, had a natural resonance with the interests of the modern composer. Mark Delaere has made this particular case in a chapter analysing Harrison Birtwistle’s Hoquetus Petrus, highlighting what he has called the exemplary or legitimating function of music from the late medieval period (2009, p. 192). The musical innovations of the fourteenth-century Ars Nova, he says, were as radical as those of the twentieth century; it is often argued that composers from both periods shared a similar ambition to write a truly new kind of music. British medievalism in perspective Musical modernism’s interest in, and debt to, the techniques of a distant musical past intensified, I would argue, later in the century and in the post-war period. Whilst modernism, it might be said, reached a natural apex by the outbreak of World War II, it casts a long and lingering shadow. Where literary theory uses the term ‘late modernism’ typically to describe a generation of authors active immediately before and after the war, in music the term has retained some capital for identifying types of a highly formalised or institutionalised avant- garde where, in a rapidly diversified and increasingly popular musical scene, emergent descriptions like the ‘postmodern’ have not seemed appropriate.4 Whilst a form of modernist medievalism can be found in the works of conservative figures such as Carl Orff, it might also be observed in the radically progressive Darmstadt composers (Boulez, Stockhausen et al.). Those composers were driven—again, somewhat contradictorily—by a politically motivated and forward-looking desire to wipe the slate clean following the traumas of the Second World War. Indeed, that they took their cue from Webern—perhaps the most medievally inclined of the Viennese School—instead of, say, Schoenberg, is only the beginning of it, and, as David Metzer argues, after self-consciously ‘reinventing’ music in the 1950s, Darmstadt seemed to quickly exhaust the techniques of total serialism and fall back into borrowing and collage during the 1960s (2003, p. 111). The resultant musical style (or styles) connected with a later wave of Darmstadt-associated composers like Luciano Berio, Mauricio Kagel, and Bernd Alois Zimmermann embodies what Metzer calls a ‘confluence of different periods,’ by which the historical linearity of time as typically manifest in musical discourse is instead imagined as a ‘space in which past, present, and future were all equidistant from the centre’ (Metzer, 2003, pp. 108–109). Zimmerman himself referred to this as ‘the sphericality of time’; a music animated by temporally disruptive logics of anachronism. Chronological non-linearities of this sort exemplify broader cultural anxieties regarding the past, and reiterate, to a point, the modernist moment at the start of twentieth century which anticipated (and then responded to) the violence of the First World War. Notwithstanding an aesthetics which responds to historical trauma, this discussion so far has concerned a very particular internationally minded, but essentially continental, modernism (and its historicist correlate). This recurrent impulse among composers to compose with the past has many and varied sources, which are historically and culturally rooted. Often overlooked when discussing twentieth century musical modernism, the extent to which British composers were involved in Darmstadt during its heyday is underappreciated, and, as Philip Rupprecht has recently noted, far from trivial (2015, p. 72). While, no doubt, a context of modernist musical internationalism in the Darmstadt vein retains relevance for the discussion to come—especially since the Manchester School are much credited with belatedly bringing its innovations to the British Isles—the particular ways that post-war British modernist composers came to incorporate the distant past in their music (as well as the contexts in which they did so) is noteworthy. This is especially the case from the late 1960s, a period when Darmstadt’s influence on the contemporary music world began to wane.5 It is timely, then, for a discussion of how British composers have reused our shared musical past in that same period, and to what extent they did so in a distinctly ‘British’ way.

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