Opera has always needed a story. Some inspirations are direct
– like Britten’s Turn of the Screw, or Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde,
and others, like Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, or Verdi’s Rigoletto,
take a story and shift it.
Why not take an opera and shift it?
All the stories in this collection have done exactly that;
found a piece of music and worked it into a new shape. It doesn’t
matter whether the reader knows the source or not – the stories
are wonderful in their own right – but those who do know the
operas will get an extra twist of pleasure from peering into the
forge where they were made.
The brief to each writer was simple: choose an opera, and
from its music or its characters, its plot or its libretto, or even a
mood evoked, write a story.
Glyndebourne is one of the most innovative opera houses
in the world, and for that reason a collection of new stories to
celebrate its seventy-fifth birthday seemed like a tribute to its
remarkable past and a flare sent up towards the future.
The music began in 1934, after a rather shy John Christie
had met the rather sparkling Audrey Mildmay, an opera singer.
They had fallen in love, and as Christie happened to have a
stately home, he offered it as a love-gift to his wife. They would
start an opera house together, get a few Members to subscribe,
put on The Marriage of Figaro…
The thing ran on rather a small scale at first, then it was
interrupted by the War, but at the end of the War, Glyndebourne
decided to reopen with a new commission – the young
Benjamin Britten’s Rape of Lucretia, with Kathleen Ferrier in
the title role.
Brave or what? Just when everyone longed for the familiar
and the known, for straightforward entertainments and light
relief, Glyndebourne backed a young man writing a new opera,
and did so to reaffirm culture as necessary to a civilized life.
This was no grand gesture, no posturing – it was a simple
and heartfelt belief in music and its emotional power, in art as
a force for good.
Seventy-five years later, still in the Christie family, and running
without public subsidy, Glyndebourne offers world-class
opera every year from May until August, and continues to
support new work, and to stage some of the more difficult or less
easily understood operas, as well as the core rep.
I think that Glyndebourne is a place where people can find
opera for the first time, and fall in love with it. I think it is a
place that has kept its values. Yes, some tickets cost a fortune,
but some don’t, and whether you dine in style or eat sardine
sandwiches on the lawn, the music is what matters.
That opera is a necessary synthesis of words and music makes
it so potent. The stories in this collection have the music in
them. The rhythm, breath, movement of language, like music,
creates emotional situations not dependent on meaning. The
meaning is there, but the working of the language itself, separate
from its message, allows the brain to make connections
that bypass sense. This makes for an experience where there
is the satisfaction of meaning but also something deeper,
stranger. This deeper stranger place is an antidote to so much
of life that is lived on the surface alone. When we read, when
we listen to music, when we immerse ourselves in the flow of an
opera, we go underneath the surface of life. Like going underwater
the noise stops, and we concentrate differently.
These stories are quite different from each other, and
absorbing in unexpected ways. What they share is the music,
and what I hope they will prompt is a curiosity about music, in
particular, opera, among readers who might think that opera is
not for them. Story lovers who are also opera lovers will delight
in the inventions, and be moved, I hope, by the richness of these
collisions between words and music.
In the end it is all about feeling. I think we spend quite a lot of
time trying to control our feelings, only to find ourselves hopelessly
overwhelmed when we least expect, or least want it to
happen.
For me, opera is a place where all the emotions can be
fully felt yet safely contained. Certainly this has therapeutic
value, but art is not therapy – at least not principally so: it is
a profound engagement with life itself, in all its messiness, its
glory, its fear, its possibility, its longing, its love.
And these stories here, funny, sad, wise, true, reflective,
speculative, ardent, each with its own tempo and written in its
own key, are ways to think, and ways to feel.
And there’s Posy in the middle, drawing us in, reminding us
that we are part of the picture, as well as part of the song.
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