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Mark Padmore and Elizabeth Atherton in The Corridor
Mark Padmore and Elizabeth Atherton in The Corridor. Photograph: Donald Cooper
Mark Padmore and Elizabeth Atherton in The Corridor. Photograph: Donald Cooper

Harrison Birtwistle, Medea and me

This article is more than 8 years old

Birtwistle and David Harsent have written a companion piece to their opera The Corridor. Ahead of its Aldeburgh premier, the librettist explains how Middle English poetry led them back to Ancient Greece

Just before the Aldeburgh festival premiere of our opera The Corridor, in 2009, Harrison Birtwistle and I were in a music publisher’s office. A pamphlet of my libretto for the piece was being prepared and someone called across the room: “What do we put, Harry? Is it ‘Words by David Harsent set to music by Harrison Birtwistle?’” Harry shouted back: “No. Put ‘Words by David Harsent fucked up by Harrison Birtwistle.’” Harry knows I don’t think that, but his sour joke must have been prompted by a realisation that some librettists do. I can see why it occurs, but that way of thinking is wrong, indeed dangerous, hinting at exploitation and betrayal. Opera is about the music; few people speak of Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni or Piave’s La Traviata, though it is true that, before the first note can be brought to the score, the librettist will have written a full-length drama: narrative, characters, dialogue – the substance of the piece and its armature. Whether the composer is setting a dramatic piece or a prose extract or a poem, the writer’s composition – the way he first set his lines – won’t count for much. The point is (as the wryness in Harry’s remark suggests) that the lines, when set to music, are not fucked up: they become an indivisible part of something else.

For some time, Harry and I had wanted to write a companion piece for The Corridor. When it came to us, it came by chance. Harry reads a good deal of poetry. He found, in an anthology published about the turn of the 19th century, a few lines that nagged at him. They were in Middle English and he didn’t fully understand them; he asked me to translate. What he had found was a short extract from John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (which, coincidentally, Faber had just asked me to adapt to modern English) where Gower retells an episode from Ovid’s account of the Medea story. Jason and Medea have returned from Colchis with the golden fleece. Jason’s father, Aeson, is old, frail and close to death. Jason asks Medea to take 10 years from his life and – using her power as a witch – endow Aeson with them so he can join the celebrations. Medea replies that she can rejuvenate Aeson without need of Jason’s sacrifice. At night, she goes out to gather herbs to make a potion. It is this moment that the fragment from Gower describes, and it was the last two lines with which Harry was particularly taken: “Al specheles and on the gras / She glod forth as an Addre doth”.

The image of Medea under moonlight – barefoot, her hair down, skirts lifted, the world about her silent, and gliding out like an adder – was the kick start for The Cure, our new piece for the Aldeburgh festival and the Royal Opera House. As always, we spent quite some time talking before I began on the libretto. Harry already had some musical ideas that were also theatrical ideas, and these would, to some extent, dictate the dramatic shape of the piece. As we talked, Harry made sketches in my notebook – diagrams, almost – illustrating the dramatic through-line in terms of Aeson’s gradual return from near-incoherence to full melismatic aria. I had some ideas of my own that tied in with what Harry was proposing. Things tend to come together like that when we’re planning an opera. We both seem to carry very similar images and progressions in our heads. I once said, when talking about the initial on-stage setup for The Minotaur – and the images that determined the pattern for the piece – that we seemed to arrive at them without having to exchange and compare ideas.

John Tomlinson in The Minotaur at the Royal Opera Housein 2013. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/Guardian

There are parallels – though they were never looked-for or intended – between The Corridor and The Cure. The earlier piece focuses on the moment when Orpheus turns and looks back, thereby condemning Eurydice to Hades. In my take on that myth, Eurydice is far from sure that she ever wanted to return to life:

Suppose he’d brought me out; imagine that – / the blaze of noon, unbearable, the wind / sour in my nostrils, grass like flint underfoot, / his spittle stinging my lip, / a tangle of voices, urgent, meaningless, / my true language the soft / hints and gentle laughter of the dead.

Similarly, Aeson regards being suddenly yanked back to youth as unnatural, and the notion of living life again as a kind of punishment:

More chance of sadness; more chance of loss; / another trudge into old age, waiting / for my sight to fail, my hearing to fail, my body to weaken … / I had lived my life. Now I have time back I am lost in time; / I must live my past again as another man.

In myth, Eurydice and Aeson are silent. It came naturally to me to give them a presence and a voice.

The repetitions that Harry had in mind for The Cure worked perfectly for me. I wanted to devise a returning but progressive ritual: three core moments in which Medea’s magic takes effect by different means than in Ovid. To do this I developed the source material in a way that might be seen as radical, but which served my purpose without traducing the original. My account has to do with a damaging intimacy. The dramatic responses between Medea and Aeson, as she brings him back to youth and vigour, and a growing tension between Medea and Jason, develop in ways that complicate and darken those relationships.

If it’s possible – and it is – to think of this episode in the Medea drama as backstory to Euripides’ great play, my version hints at that tragedy more strongly. Medea first helped Jason by magical means when her father required him to perform seemingly impossible tasks in order to win the fleece. She did this because – though a sorceress herself, grand-daughter to Helios and niece to Hecate and Circe – she was put under a love spell by Aphrodite. She is still in love with Jason when she agrees to rejuvenate Aeson. And she will still be in love with him when he abandons her for Glauce, the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth. It is the almost brutal intensity of that love that causes her to punish him by murdering their children. It might be said that Aphrodite’s white magic turns black, but white is, itself, the colour of threat: vacuity, blindness, lack, the tyranny of innocence … Medea’s white-hot rage prompts homicidal anger and that emotion overwhelms maternal love:

I shall kill my children: kill them both.
/ No one shall save them, no one shall
own them. […] How is it I can bear
such guilt / but not the laughter of
my enemies?

In The Corridor, Orpheus intends to bring Eurydice out of hell and so recover what he owned but has had taken from him. In The Cure, Jason wants his father restored to youth so the old man can celebrate his son’s triumph. Medea is in full possession of her power but uses it indulgently; later she will turn to filicide as a means to avenge hurt pride. The gods punish hubris.

The Corridor and The Cure double bill opens the Aldeburgh festival at the Britten Studio, Snape, on 12 June. aldeburgh.co.uk

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