The Origins of Broken Strings

by David Rudkin

Late in 1988, Param Vir sent me a selection of Jataka tales, to see if any of them might suggest itself as the basis for an opera.  These are legends of the Buddha in his previous incarnations, and rather resemble parables:  each story-image is memorable - and puzzling;  only as one reflects upon it, does the image begin to yield meanings.  Perhaps ‘meanings’ is too foreclosed a notion.  These tales are more enigmatic than the Christian parables - and where one of these legends, Guttil Jatak, did particularly echo in me, I wasn’t responding to any ‘meaning’ I discerned in it;  in fact, the story quite perplexed me.  I was responding instinctively to the image in it.

Guttil Jatak tells of an old Master musician, Guttil, constrained to compete in public.  As he plays, the strings of his instrument one by one begin to break.  Yet - for so the God has whispered in his ear - he must play on.  And from Guttil’s instrument, with each string that breaks, an even more wondrous music begins to sound...

It was only after I had been meeting Param Vir at intervals for over a year, evolving with him by now a third version of the libretto text, that I began to discern a ‘meaning’ in this tale.  This may seem wrongways-about;  but what comes first to me is never a rationally felt intellectual concept:  it’s always an image.  It’s like stumbling onto an unknown shore in the dark, and having to map the hinterland.  It was only as I was well into this process with the image of Guttil and his breaking strings, as I began to come up against serious practical difficulties in organizing it as an onstage narrative, that a ‘meaning’ to the tale began to appear.  I began dimly to perceive in it a dreamlike reflection of a life-journey that I myself was making.  Such a personal parallel is of little public relevance, and I mention it only because it suggests a way in which this apparently puzzling story can begin to make personal sense to anyone.  I saw that, as an author, I myself had - yes - ‘harped’ on certain biographical, polemical, sexual, political themes that seemed integral to my creative identity.  Yet throughout the 80s my work had begun to fail.  I was confronting the possibility that my entire artistic life might prove a waste.  What I began to become aware of, as I worked with Param Vir on this piece, was that these themes - so far from being essential - had in fact been a limiting, an obstruction even, to my art.  One after another, each theme was generating a work that in some sense failed.  My precious themes had to be let go.  My ‘strings’ had to break.  Each string’s breaking was a grievous personal loss - of a love, or of a faith, or of a sense of tribal belonging - factors that had sustained my life till now.  Now, one then another, each ‘string’ was gone;  and I was left in a vaster and a deeper isolation.  To put it another way:  my art was growing.  As to a more general ‘meaning’, the need to learn to live on, to ‘sing on’, to evolve and grow, depending on less and less to sustain us - this seems to me a universal necessity.

I mentioned a third working of the libretto.  In fact, the version that Param Vir ultimately composed with was to be our eighth.  Why have we needed to rework the libretto so many times?  From the beginning, one major source of trouble was that - metaphor or not - this was to be an opera about music.  This does present peculiar dramaturgical difficulties.  For instance, how do we dramatize a practising musician onstage?  An actor-singer, fake-playing a musical instrument, has to simulate and synchronize with a ‘real’ musician in the pit.  Done well, it’s impressive - but, the better done, the more is it a distraction, for we notice how well it is done, and that comes between us and the character.  Done badly, it’s sheer embarrassment.  Either way, it foregrounds a technical aspect of performance, at the expense of the meaning.  It also subverts the integrity of the characterization.  For a Papageno and Siegfried with their pipes, the playing can be bodily ‘acted’, and characterized, the instrument is small and permits it.  With larger instruments, the technical problems become visible:  and they become moral problems too, for now there will visibly be a significant aspect of the character - his musicianship - that the actor is not providing.  Moreover, in Broken Strings, the musicianship itself is the character;  and the playing of the instrument is the story, and it’s centre-stage, beginning to end.  Worse, we have not only one musician, but two, and in competition;  so it’s central to the story that their characters, as musicians, be in contrast.  Again, this story commits us to string instruments.  We are committed also to dramatizing somehow an instrument whose strings must punctually break onstage...

It was clear to me, very early, that we needed to evolve therefore a highly conventionalized style of staging, so that our onstage musician characters would not be hostage to any naturalistic problems.  This is why, from my very first attempts on the libretto, I adopted the device of framing the contest story as a ‘play within a play’.  In a ‘play within the play’ the stylization can be quite extreme.  Indeed, conventionally we expect it to be so.

I use the term ‘play within the play’;  to say ‘opera within the opera’ does sound clumsy and wilful.  And in fact Param Vir and I never have viewed our collaboration as upon an ‘opera’ as such, but as a work of music theatre.  My governing intention has been, throughout, to achieve a dramaturgy and text of an energy so compressed, that the music would come to the composer from inside the material, rather than he externally ‘set’ it.  Yet, what ‘music’?  How many different ‘musics’ must the composer find?  A ‘framing’ music for the world of the King, for whom the story of the music contest is being staged.  A more stylized music, for the stylized staging of the inner story.  An ‘inferior’ music, for the ‘inferior’ musician - and how are the audience to be helped identify it as inferior?  And all this, without its becoming a reductionist battle of fashionable styles...  Most of all, a more and more miraculous music as the old man’s strings begin to break.  Altogether, the composer must, in some sense, become a Guttil himself...  These are problems not for the composer alone.  The librettist must furnish a dramaturgy that renders the composing problems clear, and soluble.

And other dramaturgical problems present themselves.  For instance, in our play-within-our-play, can our two contestants sing their thoughts?  If so, how can we theatrically detach this singing from the onstage texture of music in action, so that the audience don’t hear the singing as part of the contest?  In fact there are several dimensions of ‘shared’ and ‘unshared’ reality in play onstage, in and out of which the librettist, as dramatist, has to manoeuvre the audience without their knowing, so that they ‘read’ the action naturally and accurately.  Dramaturgically most challenging, perhaps, is the problem of the fourth string’s breaking.  One by one, already three strings have gone - in linear succession.  The fourth string’s breaking cannot merely be the next in line:  it has to be of some altogether different species of breaking;  and somehow unpredictable, logical and ‘right’ yet still surprising when it comes.

By the time we were working the fifth version of the libretto, we began to feel that we had trapped ourselves in an infinite regress of insolubles.  Yet, as I have found so often happen in working a piece on the stage, here too the evolving onstage story was coming more and more to mirror our creative process itself.  Each version of the libretto seemed so stable as I evolved it.  When put to the test of examination by the composer and myself, it disintegrated.  Like a breaking string, indeed...  And as each string broke, it left us with a despairing sense that the whole endeavour was misconceived, and should be abandoned.  I became angry with the material, for proving so intractable.  Angry with myself too, for ‘choosing’ this story at all.  Yet, as each working failed us, soon the project was gathering its own momentum again, with a deep inward insistence of its own - much like Guttil himself;  and we began to discover the text and the narrative becoming tougher and richer...  and simpler and more translucent too.  Which is right.  For it should not feel to an audience like the eighth, or indeed any, reworking.   It should feel in performance as though it is coming naturally right first time.