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Thebans: 'Families are terrifying things'
Composer Julian Anderson and librettist Frank McGuinness on turning Sophocles' Oedipus into a taut musical drama at ENO
The doomed Oedipus and his unyielding daughter Antigone have been the subject of innumerable individual operas since the early 18th century, but Julian Anderson is breaking new ground in combining their tales into one work. Be reassured, though, this will not be a Wagnerian marathon: in collaboration with the Irish playwright Frank McGuinness, Anderson has boldly telescoped Sophocles’ three full-length plays into a bare hundred minutes of music.
The result, starkly entitled Thebans, will be given its premiere by ENO on May 3 in a production conducted by Edward Gardner and directed by Pierre Audi, with Roland Wood and Julia Sporsen in the central roles. But what took him so long? Anderson is 47 and has been much admired on the contemporary music scene for over two decades. Yet although he has written much vocal and choral music, as well as a ballet score, this will be his first opera.
Anderson shrugs the question off. “Nothing caught fire – it’s as simple as that. And I suppose that opera comes at the end of a long process of learning: it’s something I’ve gradually been working up to.” Having passed over several opportunities to write a chamber opera on the grounds that the small-scale “leaves nowhere to hide”, he toyed with the idea of The Tempest – “but Adès got there first, and anyway, I think it would have been too problematic a place at which to start”.
Neither too big nor too small, the Ancient Greek idea consolidated four years ago after long urging from ENO and a first meeting with McGuinness, whose version of Oedipus the King Anderson had seen and much admired at the National Theatre in 2008.
McGuinness has been following an even steeper learning curve. Based in Dublin, shamefully the only European capital without an established national opera company, he grew up as an aficionado of folk and country music and has written lyrics for his former neighbour and chum Marianne Faithfull. Opera is something he always thought that he “didn’t have the patience for. But the turning point was seeing a film of Don Giovanni – suddenly, I got a sense of how a libretto could work dramatically.” He’s moved on now: when this interview took place, he was excited about going to see Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten at the ROH, and when he first heard the music that Anderson had written for his words, he was so moved that he broke down and wept.
For Anderson, there had been an initial worry that because he had already translated Oedipus the King, McGuinness might be “too steeped in it” to start afresh. But that has not proved to be the case, and unlike so many composer-librettist relationships, theirs has been happily uncomplicated. “One strong aim for me throughout”, Anderson jokes, “has been to write an opera that Frank wouldn’t find boring.”
Their most contentious decision has been to scramble the obvious chronology, reversing the temporal order in which the play of Oedipus at Colonus, which completes the story of the exiled king, would be followed by Antigone, focused on what happens to his sons and daughters after his death.
“My massive worry was that Antigone would be a terrific downer on which to end,” McGuinness explains, “and what made it easier was the knowledge that Sophocles never conceived the three plays as a trilogy – we know that he wrote Antigone at least 10 years before Oedipus the King.”
“Oedipus at Colonus may be an inward and meditative drama, but it’s not half as static as people often think,” Anderson continues. “In fact, it contains one of the most terrific outbursts in all of Greek drama, Oedipus’ curse on his sons, an episode which has been exciting to set to music. But the play would be hopeless in the middle, it would hold everything up, and because it is so very much about the end of someone’s life, it seems to belong at the end of the dramatic arc.”
Composer and librettist met formally only five times, and Anderson waited until McGuinness had emailed him the complete text of each of the three plays (condensed and worked up from a literal translation from the original Greek) before he started writing any music. “Frank gave me licence to make small changes and basically, if there was a good line, I tried to find a way to set it. The whole process was very companionable: now I’m writing a string quartet, I miss having the stimulus of Frank’s lines to inspire me.”
“I trusted Julian and told him to do whatever he thought would work musically,” McGuinness concurs, admitting that he felt he had to take a back seat in the process once the texts were submitted. “But I’m grand with that: you let the music take over. I don’t own it now, the performers own it.”
McGuinness has been left with a strong feeling that Sophocles had an underlying theme, which he encapsulates as “the failure of fathers. We fail our fathers, and our fathers fail us. Father is the last word of the opera. And I would also say that the plays show that families are terrifying things. There are many contemporary resonances too, but that is the essence of it.”
For Anderson, the challenge was to find a sound world which could simultaneously convey the modernity, the antiquity and the eternity of these dramas. He loves the way that Stravinsky set Oedipus the King in Oedipus Rex, but he didn’t feel impelled to emulate that sort of monumental neoclassicism – “Stravinsky did it so well that there’s nothing more to add. If anything, I’ve been more intrigued by something much less well known, Enescu’s Oedipe, which follows the character from birth to death in un-Sophoclean fashion and stops short of Antigone.”
Berg’s Wozzeck and Janacek’s Katya Kabanova – models of concision and intensity – were also on his mind as he composed. “There are some set numbers, such as Antigone’s aria before she is buried alive, but mostly it is cast as arioso.” Now, after his late start, he is itching to return to opera and has several unspecified ideas brewing. “But perhaps we’d better see how this one goes down first.”
