On Composing the Double Bill


Param Vir

As I began work on Snatched by the Gods and Broken Strings, one question insistently impinged on me: the simple question of how life is to be lived. I hoped the stories of the two operas would serve up images that could shape an answer. Like the King in Broken Strings I was compelled to see, in the mirror of these stories, a metaphor that might illuminate a search for meaning, to find a resonance between musical rhythms that are the proper business of a composer, and the larger rhythms of darkness and light that are the substance of our lives.

In Snatched, Tagore presents us with condensed archetypal action. We encounter here the perennial triangle of victim, persecutor and saviour. Moksada, a young widow, looks for meaning in her life, but in a moment of unconsciousness utters a fatal curse, thus becoming prey to the destructive projections of her fellow pilgrims. Within her family, she deals inadequately with her domineering sister Annada and her wilful son Rakhal. Maitra, the village elder, ostensibly guides the pilgrimage, but his piety founders during the storm, when he is confronted with the possibility of death. He draws the pilgrims into deeper ignorance as he relapses into persecution and directs their hysteria towards Moksada. His conscience awakens too late as he attempts the role of saviour, plunging into the river to try to save the child. The Pilgrims, caught in the web of the collective unconscious, find a natural ally for their heartlessness in the Boatman as they victimise the innocent. Rakhal, Moksada’s little son, embodies this innocence: from the moment he appears in the story, he does not participate in the scheme of reactive emotion, nor does he carry the burdens of self-delusion and unattained spirituality. His is the playful light voice within us that needs to be heard: a voice carelessly and easily stilled, whether by ‘education’, religious dogma or creative sterility.

Images of earth, water, air and fire suffuse Tagore’s poem with symbolic meaning, rising to a head in the storm where nature and man collide in explosive fury. Tagore carefully structures the symbolism, following a binary scheme: most of the first half of his poem takes place on terra firma, on the banks of a river, as preparations are made for the journey. The second half unfolds over water, as the boat returns and is threatened by a terrible storm. Water is the element of feeling; communion with the emotional world is, perhaps, most poignantly expressed in Rakhal’s dreamlike cry, “I’m going to the sea”. His aunt Annada, strangely, does not join the pilgrims and remains on the river bank. As the boat, with its exuberant human cargo, speeds on its journey, tears appear as premonitions. For Rakhal’s river journey is soon to become a death by drowning, as the storm gives vent to human weakness, fear and ignorance. By way of premonition, the midpoint of Tagore’s poem has haunting lines that play on the contrast between water and earth, to convey an oppressive quality:

“...cruel and mean and spiteful water,
How like a thousand-headed snake it seems,
So full of deceit, greedy tongues darting,
Hoods rearing, mouths foaming as it hisses and roars
And eternally lusts for the children of Earth!
O Earth, how speechlessly loving you are,
How stable, how certain, how ancient; how smilingly
Greenly, softly tolerant of all
Upheavals; wherever we are, your invisible
Arms embrace us all, day and night...”

This is the still centre of the poem and offers insight into the strain felt by mother and son, caught in a chain of causality whose tragic outcome is yet to unfold. Their duet, at the outset of the return journey, though not a part of Tagore’s narrative, became psychologically inevitable in the opera as we sought to clarify the hidden power and oppression of the curse and the deep schism it opens between the mother and the other pilgrims.

Tagore’s use of fire, light and sun as metaphors is precise: the journey, lasting two months, is framed between sunrise and sunset. Prayers are uttered as the sun rises, but the sun reveals shadow, a shadow that is finally projected onto Moksada and Rakhal. William Radice shaped this area of darkness explicitly in his libretto: the pilgrims’ prayers are interspersed with constant ‘chatter’ – verbal graffiti plotting their humdrum everyday concerns. Seemingly trite in the beginning, it gathers enough coarse energy to coalesce into a terrifying death-chant in the storm scene. Here light is blotted out, as the text and music churn up a turbulence that brings us to the dark climax of the story. Fire lances Maitra’s dormant conscience as the child drowns:

A sharp cry sears his heart like a whiplash
Of lightning, stings like a scorpion — “Aunt Annada,
Aunt Annada, Aunt Annada,!” That helpless, hopeless
Drowning cry stabs Maitra’s tightly
Shut ears like a spike of fire...

Is this baptism by fire, as Maitra plunges into the river to embrace his truth?

By drawing on the poem’s array of archetypes and natural symbols, William Radice and I searched for an appropriate timbre for the narrative, adding to it where necessary, to contain and construct within it the extraordinary violence that unleashes itself. It became thus possible to understand how ‘ordinary’, ‘decent’ people, ostensibly on a pilgrimage, plummet into a destructive vortex. We had to trace the threads of causality backwards from this vortex, shape the opera into a clear, arching progression.

Snatched by the Gods has a powerful narrative line, but it is not bound to simplistic naturalism. At critical moments William’s text arrests the action: for example, the curse is repeated thrice, not unlike three snapshots of one event: the action thus lunges out of chronological time into a stylised, formalised world.

I did not ever see Snatched as inexorably tragic. There are moments when I gladly took the opportunity to suffuse the music with energy, joy, exuberance and compassion. The compassion originates in Tagore’s poem, when he shows us Moksada at her most poignant, stepping out of the fatal web of causality, as a mother, to protect her son. This happens in the first instance immediately after the curse, when she recoils at her words and asks forgiveness; it comes again when she is confronted with terrible consequences, and has to plead for his life. There is energy and exuberance amongst the pilgrims, and in the movement of the boat as it catches the current, and speeds over water. There is joy in the splash of temple bells, gongs and finger-cymbals as the place of pilgrimage is reached, reminding us that the universe abounds in vibrant life, that human sorrow dims before this ceaseless play of light, colour and sound. And in the very last image of the opera, as the sun plunges into the river, we are able to reflect upon the deaths that have occurred. For the dying light of the setting sun, as it embraces the crumpled form of Moksada, contains the gentle promise of sunrise and rebirth.

 

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I have always been drawn to the Buddha’s vision of the human journey and the imperative to examine the nature of life from the premise that there is suffering in the world. What else could more closely unite all human beings than participation in this universal truth – that in one way or another all experience sorrow? To seek an end to sorrow, we must first examine our lives. This enquiry is not the prerogative of any one culture, ‘eastern’ or ‘western’, even less so is it the exclusive domain of philosophers or psychologists. Rather it is for each to undertake for his or her self, in the process of questioning every form of authority structure or value system grounded in limited and culturally-bound definitions about the nature of human life.

Was the Buddha an anarchist, who encouraged the questioning and searching examination of all experience? I should like to think so. He was also a brilliant analyst of the human condition. Through insight he taught that in order to be free of sorrow it was necessary to  examine the sum of one’s beliefs, morality systems, emotional fields and imprints, the entire apparatus of conditioning, dreams, suppression and repression, and the means by which one affirms or denies one’s own energy. In a word, he encouraged mindfulness. Only through this self knowledge can we hope to break through the prisons we construct around our lives.

The Buddha’s transformational technique was eight-fold, organised around the twin qualities of wisdom and compassion. So it was not just a mental exercise; it involved looking at and through our physicality and through our feeling. It was one of many ancient traditions that found ways of dealing with the reality of what is ‘out there’, ways radically different from those that we have been brought up to believe in as ‘objective’ and ‘rational’. To make this investigation truthfully asks for formidable intellectual clarity, but also a measure of compassion for self and other. Such vision is incongruous with so much of our modern world with its excessive reliance on intellectual discourse, the kind which implicitly discount the knowledge of other supra-intellectual cultures, such as the Buddhist or the native-American. The so-called scientific explanation of the world is only one possible description of reality, and often a reductive one at that. Beyond the horizons of scientism and the mindless technological capitalism it advocates, lies another world, better I hope, more magical and nurturing. Our lives defiantly unfold and participate in extraordinary mysteries, and there is an infinity of new possibilities. The questions of life haven’t all been tied up by the men of science. The doors of understanding stand open.

Guttil is a man living on the brink, facing the question of his own quality through a radical process of transmutation. His physical presence, with its musical extension into his four-stringed instrument, is the very point of the alchemy. This can take him beyond his limitations and his sorrow, his loss – to another shore. He suffers, inevitably, as he acknowledges the breaking of his strings; but he does not abandon his continuing journey. As he plays, his music awakens exquisite creatures, who dance and sing with him, making visible to us the deeper layers of his being. This magic, at first only a private reality for Guttil, gradually becomes public, as the judges first sense, then hear and finally see Elephant, Fish and Peacock. As in Snatched by the Gods, yet again elemental nature provides us with a useful grid on which to journey to awakening.

David Rudkin and I approached our opera through a process of stylisation, to explore the meaning of a story that lay beyond the surface chemistry of a courtly contest. It took three years for some of the images to reveal that meaning, and this greatly stretched the nature of the musical and dramatic transformations that inform the whole. Within the high stylisation in the form of a ‘play within a play,’ the music needed to move smoothly from one domain to another This was more than just a question of ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ plays, or mere contrast between Musil’s brilliance and Guttil’s magic. I found I needed to define many different musics: instrumental show-pieces, private monologues, courtly recitative style, dances and magical music for each of the three creatures. These all needed to share a common harmonic and rhythmic ground, to be juxtaposed, superimposed, brought in or taken out with the deftness of a montage. I partitioned the vocabulary: reserving a nine-note ‘mode of limited transposition’ for the judges’ recitatives and for Musil, but assigning to Guttil the octatonic scale (for he must do more with less, one note less precisely.) When the creatures come to life, oblique harmonic spectrums branch out from Guttil’s octatonic music, and thus offer enriched dimensions he can explore. Musil’s music, on the other hand remains fixed, unevolving, to the end.

Some questions needed answering. How should the four-stringed instrument be defined? Literal representation of a plucked-string instrument would have been limiting, apart from trivializing the dramaturgy. Too, if the ‘contest’ between Guttil and Musil was not about style, then where should that discourse be located? And what was Musil’s ‘flaw’, for his technique was flawless? Guttil’s performance has a didactic streak: in drawing out songs from the magical creatures (creatures that Musil is unable to see or hear), Guttil demonstrates a central truth - that true seeing arises from true hearing, just as true hearing arises from a life truthfully lived. When Musil’s (respectably sophisticated) music is dismissed by the judges as ‘everything, but not enough’, we may well ask, with Musil: what is ‘enough’? In answer to the question I decided to characterise Musil’s music by embedding within it an interesting flaw: his music lacks a bass line. Considered symbolically, it is rootless, unconnected to the sustenance and energy of the earth. No surprise then that it is the bass string on Guttil’s instrument that is the first to go, unleashing ‘earth-energy’ and its creature-personification, the elephant. From the earth, rooted, energised, ‘earthed’, Guttil makes his journey up his own version of Jacob’s Ladder. The ‘truth’ he aspires to is no other than to fully understand himself, to break through limitations, to heal areas of unconsciousness within himself. Musil’s flaw is tragically underlined when he twice attempts to redeem himself by lowering the tuning of his instrument. Perhaps, in some half-felt resonance with a deeper dimension, Musil fathoms his own lack. Even as he is dismissed, Guttil appears, heralded by an aura of high bell sounds;  Guttil has hearing, he is in touch with something extraordinary.

To create a sound world for the four-stringed instrument itself, my score did not limit its timbre, just as David Rudkin’s text did not fix its physical description. Our instrument is a composite of sonorities, emphasizing  plucked and bowed string sound, harp and guitar, but also coloured by xylophone and celesta. In Musil’s case, the range is shallow and borders on representation. With Guttil, the timbre (matching the expansion of harmony and rhythm) broadens to embrace the gamut of sonic possibilities within the ensemble, as one by one he picks out successive strata of perception and experience. By the time he gets to the peacock however, I could afford to strip away his entire orchestra to reveal a bare cor anglais line.

Within the stylisation there was the question of how to portray the actual breaking of the four strings. More importantly, we also had to define the fourth string itself. It was a different order of string altogether, its breaking placed in the outer ‘frame’ play. It needed a different order of creature to come in its wake. But what could come after elephant, fish and peacock?  The breaking of the fourth string in time revealed its own special gift: a ‘magical’ creature that had been present with us throughout, singing ”Here I am”.  Guttil himself, in the totality of his being, now integrated, made whole. The transformative moment of the fourth string breaking sparks the inevitable collision between the outer and inner plays as the King interferes with the image his Player-Dramatist has given him, an image that has found its mark, like a perfectly aimed arrow.

Broken Strings thus offers us a map of the journey into wholeness. One by one Elephant, Fish and Peacock are brought to life and expression, and Guttil in singing with them is born anew, made whole. I was delighted by the appearance of these magical creatures; they became my friends and danced with me too. I learnt from them something of my own substance. They gave me insight into the journey I am making.

Snatched by the Gods and Broken Strings are dedicated to my former teachers Peter Maxwell Davies and Oliver Knussen respectively. To both I owe a debt of deep gratitude.

1992 (revised)