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Shakespeare and Modern British Opera: Into the Knot Garden

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Shakespeare and Modern British Opera: Into the Knot Garden Michael Graham Royal Holloway, University of London Shakespeare and Modern British Opera: Into The Knot Garden Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Music April 2017 Shakespeare and Modern British Opera: Into The Knot Garden Declaration of Authorship This thing of darkness I Acknowledge mine. I, Michael Graham, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: MICHAEL GRAHAM Date: 17/04/2017 2 Shakespeare and Modern British Opera: Into The Knot Garden Abstract To date, the scholarly literature has not sufficiently examined the extent to which Shakespeare’s plays helped to develop a national operatic tradition within the ideological context of modern Britain. This thesis is a contribution towards rectifying this oversight. Chapter 1 outlines the development of Shakespearian musicology, and emphasises the importance of music analysis to the elucidation of opera. Chapter 2 then presents a series of short analyses of modern British Shakespeare operas, and highlights how several of these works depict issues of gender and sexuality in a remarkably frank and sometimes subversive fashion. Chapter 3 explains this thesis’s particular focus on Tippett’s The Knot Garden, a psychoanalytic, operatic version of The Tempest from the late 1960s. It posits a number of reasons why both literary scholarship and musicology have overlooked this composer and his Shakespearian work, and explains the pressing requirement for a detailed close reading of Tippett's Tempest opera that simultaneously situates it within broader musical, cultural, and historical narratives. It particularly contends that Tippett’s works require further exploration from the perspectives of gender, sexuality, and autobiography, after the fashion of recent scholarship on his friend and contemporary, Britten. The production of such work will allow a more balanced, nuanced, and constellatory understanding of British music from recent decades. Part 2 of the thesis offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary exploration of The Knot Garden, which combines musical and textual analysis with biographical information, critical theory, literary and theatrical history, and Lacanian and Jungian psychoanalysis. Through a series of character sketches, this case study considers Tippett’s interrogations of contemporary gender, sexuality, and psychology. The conclusion questions current ideas of ‘British’ and ‘Shakespearian’ opera. It furthermore highlights The Knot Garden’s deeply personal nature, its Shakespearian, ‘revolutionary universality’, its blend of Jungian humanism and Lacanian posthumanism, and the radical, ‘hysterical’ personality of Flora- Miranda. 3 Shakespeare and Modern British Opera: Into The Knot Garden Contents Acknowledgements 8 List of Musical Examples 10 List of Figures 13 List of Tables 13 Part 1 Shakespearian Music(ology) 1. Interdisciplinarity, or Shakespeare and Music 15 Cakes and ale 18 Exemplars 33 Text + Event 41 2. Shakespeare and Modern British Opera 46 Feminine Falstaff: Gustav Holst, At The Boar’s Head (1925) 50 Alice’s green sleeves: Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sir John in Love (1929) 57 A queer wood: Benjamin Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960) 64 Rotten and putrefying: Humphrey Searle, Hamlet (1968) 70 Visible divinity, invisible whores: Stephen Oliver, Timon of Athens (1991) 73 ‘The island’s full of noises’: Thomas Adès, The Tempest (2004) 88 Recent efforts: Goehr, Styles, and Tchaikowsky 94 4 Shakespeare and Modern British Opera: Into The Knot Garden 3. The Tempest and Tippett: Lacunae 107 Tempestuous times I: colonialism and postcolonialism 108 Tempestuous times II: psychoanalysis, gender, and sexuality 115 An overlooked Tempest 118 An outdated composer? An outdated ‘opera’? 120 The pointless game 132 Music and sexuality in Tippett 139 The Prospero fallacy? 143 Tippett, Jung, Lacan 152 Part 2 The Knot Garden: Shakespeare, Sexuality, Psychoanalysis 4. Act I: ‘Confrontation’, or Twentieth-Century Blues 166 The urban labyrinth 167 ‘Surely some revelation is at hand’ 173 ‘Prospero, man of power’: Mangus-Freud-Schoenberg 179 Thea’s lady garden 186 ‘O, you may stare in horror’: Denise the ‘menacing visionary’ 191 ‘Do, do not, “do not torment me”’: Tippett’s blues 200 5. Act II: ‘Labyrinth’, or Men, Women, and Children 210 Faber: midlife crisis man-child 212 Flora: Miranda in Wonderland 232 Dov-Ariel: Tippett Androgyne 235 ‘I will dress myself in green...’ 245 ‘You know Fresca, we really belong to each other’ 257 5 Shakespeare and Modern British Opera: Into The Knot Garden 6. Act III: ‘Charade’, or Moving into Aquarius 261 ‘I am no more afraid’: Thea’s Imaginary marriage 266 ‘Prospero’s a fake’ 281 A poet in a barren age 285 ‘We sense the magic net’: Holy Theatre 292 Conclusions 309 Tippett’s Tempest: an opera of its time? 313 The Knot Garden’s revolutionary universality 318 The soulove of Flora and Dov 324 Flora-Miranda, Tippett’s aspirational hysteric 329 Tippett’s Lacanian posthumanism 333 Bibliography 337 6 Shakespeare and Modern British Opera: Into The Knot Garden To Dad, for taking me to Shakespeare. To Mum, for taking me to music lessons. 7 Shakespeare and Modern British Opera: Into The Knot Garden Acknowledgements I owe several people a great deal of thanks for their intellectual, emotional, and financial help over the past five years. Unquestionably, my biggest debt of gratitude goes to my parents, Mervyn and Tracey Graham, who have always offered me unconditional love, patience, and support. Thanks also to my brothers and closest allies, Tim and Andrew, both of whom are exceptional individuals (and ‘proper doctors’ to boot). And belated thanks to my grandparents, Albert and Olwen Beaven, who always encouraged me to attempt this project, but are sadly not here to see its completion. I offer a particularly humungous ‘thank you’ to my supervisor, Paul Harper-Scott, a brilliant tutor who has given endless encouragement, guidance, and knowledge throughout the PhD process. Any intellectual development I have made over the past five years is down to him. Many thanks as well to my main advisor, Kiernan Ryan, whose comments and suggestions always enhanced the ambition and quality of my work. I am also grateful to my examiners, David Beard and Mark Berry, for taking the time to read my thesis so thoroughly, and for providing me with an invigorating viva. Thank you also to my university, Royal Holloway, for granting me several research and travel awards over the last few years. These donations allowed me to pursue this project in the first place, to share and improve my ideas, and to visit some brilliant places in the process. Several other people in the academic world have helped me greatly along the way. Thanks to Kenneth Gloag for offering me the opportunity to collaborate with him on a conference presentation exploring gender in Tippett’s operas that informed much of my future research. I am also grateful to Stephen Banfield for his immensely generous donation of a small Tippett library, which made it considerably easier to research this thesis. Thank you to Elizabeth Eva Leach and Daniel Grimley for their ongoing support of my professional endeavours, and to 8 Shakespeare and Modern British Opera: Into The Knot Garden Julie Brown for her considerable efforts on my behalf while Director of Graduate Studies at the Royal Holloway Department of Music. Stephen Downes’s and Anna Morcom’s assistance during the latter stages of this project has also been much appreciated. I would furthermore like to mention those tutors and teachers who helped and inspired me at earlier stages of my education, particularly Gwyn Morgans, Sara Lovell-Jones, Jan Richards, Becci Connor, Susan Garcia, Emanuele Senice, Enrique Sacau, Mervyn Cooke, and Sarah Hibberd. To Emma Court: thank you for your love and encouragement, for making me smile, and for keeping on at me to get the damned thing finished! Thanks as well to Emma’s family and friends for their warmth and hospitality. To my friends: a heartfelt ‘thank you’ for your conversation and company, and an equally heartfelt ‘I’m sorry’ for not thanking every single one of you in detail. A particular mention must go to my long-suffering college sister-wife, Jess Williams, for her remarkable kindness and support at both an academic and personal level. Special thanks also to Tim Cox for his counsel and humour, and Beth Grant for her support and advice. Many thanks also to Sarah Moynihan and her family for their generosity over a number of years. Grace McKay, Frances McIntosh, Ant Strong, Rosanna MacBeath, Dai Bowe, Jen Thorp, Becky Dowson, Sam Roberts, Alistair Wrench, David Williams, Toby Warren, Emma Bowen, Tom Brothwell, Joana Caldeira Martino, Jon Ackland, Tamsyn Mackay, David Turnbull, Vikki Weston, Patrick Heery, Liz Clapham, Theo Jones, Hugh Everett, Joe Premier, Sara West, and Simon Morris have all offered further invaluable support, discussion, and humour during this project. Thanks to the friendly and helpful teams at Cardiff Castle, the Bodleian Library shop, and the Jesus College Development Office, in particular to Sam Hall and Ali James for their understanding management. Finally, I am hugely indebted to the rest of Paul’s talented cabal of PhD students – Chris Tarrant, Annika Forkert, John Ling, Nathan Mercieca, Rebecca Day, Kit Kimbell, Ollie Chandler, Rachel McCarthy, Frankie Perry, and William Fourie – for their invariably helpful suggestions on my thesis, and their all-round excellent company. 9 Shakespeare and Modern British Opera: Into The Knot Garden List of Musical Examples 1.1 Reimann, Lear, I. 1: Goneril. 1.2 Reimann, Lear, I. 1: Regan. 1.3 Reimann, Lear, I. 1: Cordelia. 1.4 J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Schenkerian middleground graph of ‘Dieu! que viens-je d’entendre’, from Berlioz, Béatrice et Bénédict, II. 10. 1.5 Sibelius, The Tempest, ‘The Rainbow’ (no. 23). 1.6 Sibelius, The Tempest, Prospero’s monologue (no.
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