Monday, 4 February 2008

It has been eight months since Harry Birtwistle invited me to write the programme essay on the music of The Minotaur for the Royal Opera House first production (as I did with Gawain) and also to attend rehearsals. I've received the scores from Boosey and Hawkes, two large tomes, in both the composer's manuscript and in software-generated notation (a mammoth editorial task), as well as most of a piano reduction (another mammoth task!). While the libretto contains stage directions, the score omits most of them, so, in a phone call, I ask the composer what his visual concept of the opera is, particularly in those places where even the libretto doesn't indicate what's going on. He says (describing the beginning), ‘It's all about mood: the boat to be distant and come closer. The atmosphere: heaving sea, her [Ariadne's] predicament – looking after her brother. She's frustrated in every sense.’ I comment that Theseus seems untouched by Ariadne's plight. Birtwistle is dismissive: ‘Theseus – if you follow the myth forward – that's not what he's come for’. I have a list of questions: first, about the ‘endless line’ – a theme of so many of his works. He confirms it's there, as always, but adds, ‘The real control is over intervals in the piece. It's quite consonant. I go off on something melodically – it's technical – I have two simultaneous whole-tone scales, jumping from one to another at certain places – like changing gear. I only exit at certain points, by certain intervals. There's a permanent state of switching between the two.’ This seems quite a challenge to a music analyst: two distinct whole-tone scales provide all the notes available! It's also another of Birtwistle's gleeful challenges to those who want to sift through his pitch materials and find a system.

In our discussion, Birtwistle seems to have a list: he asks what I think of the ‘toccatas’ and straightway tells me, as I'll hear him tell others later, ‘They all have the same function. They're like a car, when the engine is not in gear.’ ‘So the attention turns to the music?’ I ask. ‘Well there might be a video element …’ (he moves on to the next topic without finishing) ‘What do you think of the saxophone?’ I comment on the lovely writing, and he volunteers, ‘It's only around when she's [Ariadne's] around. But it's not supposed to be her alter ego, her voice.’ I ask about the drums on stage (accompanying the crowd in the bullring scenes), to which he replies, ‘They're proving a problem … they'd have to learn it … and they say they can't change the pedals without sitting down … it's in the process’. Then another prompt: ‘There's a quote by Auden you should follow up: he says that a good opera libretto should first be written as a dumbshow’.

I ask him what really interested him about the Minotaur – was it the split personality? He replies: ‘Yes, always the split personality’. ‘What about the violence – did that draw you?’ ‘That side of it doesn't worry me. It's also a game – in a sense – it could be a game in which nobody gets killed. These so-called Innocents are in a line. Happens every year.’ I protest: ‘But when I read through that part of the score, it overwhelmed me – I couldn't stop thinking about it.’ He retorts: ‘You obviously don't watch the same films I do!’ I don't let go of it: ‘But there are plenty of examples of violence in the world that seem to be happening “in a line” today … and it's not a game –’ Birtwistle defends his position: ‘Yes, but putting music to it … you can only treat these subjects – only with music. All the things in myth – you don't have to explain them. It's illogical. In the myth of Io, she is seduced by a god, and the super-god says she has to be stung forever by a bee. You just accept that – it is the story – it's the way it is.’

Tuesday, 19 February

I've spent a lot of time with the score and have more questions for the composer. I start with Ariadne. I ask again about her relationship with Theseus who so clearly scorns her – spits out his lines at her. Birtwistle agrees that this is so. He repeats what he said last time – that ‘she's in a terrible position … horrible half-brother …’. He says that originally there was going to be another scene in which the relationship with Theseus was to be developed – he mentions a love-duet – but that he and David Harsent cut this out. I observe that Ariadne has a much bigger part than Theseus. ‘But he kills the Minotaur’, Birtwistle responds. I ask about the saxophone: although it accompanies Ariadne most of the time, at certain important moments, it doesn't: is this significant? He replies, ‘The thing is, with the sax … when you hear the sax in the orchestra, it's the odd one out. We don't have the same attitude to the oboe. But the sax isn't slavishly associated with her [Ariadne] – it becomes increasingly related to her. I don't use the whole of the sax's range – it can go much higher – but its expressive qualities in the singer's tessitura are identical to hers.’ He says that he used the sax in the same way in The Triumph of Time. ‘And also in Mrs Kong?’ I ask. ‘Yes, but in Mrs Kong I used it to conjure up New York … I marked it “a bit jazzy”.’ ‘And here’, I laugh, ‘you mark it “a bit sleazy” – and then “not sleazy”! I like that!’ Birtwistle replies seriously, ‘Yes, I did. Because I wanted a change of style.’

I ask, ‘Do the notes ‘F’ or ‘F♯’ have a particular significance for Ariadne's line? Or is it that they are near the top of her range?’ He is ever-practical: ‘It's just that it's a high note for her. I sometimes go above. ’ I point out that it is quite a low part. ‘Well she's a mezzo.’ ‘But she could go to Ab …’ Birtwistle (quickly): ‘and she does…’ Me (interjecting); ‘but rarely …’. He assents. We move to his general style of writing for the voice. He asserts that is quite different in this opera. I remark that John Tomlinson's part has a lot of recitative, and that his arias have a lot of stepwise motion in them. (Tomlinson, of course, is the celebrated bass for whom the part was written. He was also the Green Knight/Bertilak, in Gawain, and again, the part was written for him.) Is it much easier to sing than Gawain? ‘Mm (yes)’, he replies. Pushing this line of questioning, I continue, ‘And at the important moments – at the ends of the recitatives, his important lines are all quite steady, and not angular?’ ‘Yes.’ (Birtwistle's interviewers always end up doing most of the talking, I observe to myself wryly!) But we move back to Ariadne, and he lights up. I remark that her lines almost all fall from a high note, like a sigh. He is strongly affirmative. ‘Yes! Well, that was intentional, all the way through, of course!’

I comment on his notational style: ‘Every phrase, every sub-phrase, every note – it's all marked so precisely! Yet, in a long and difficult opera where everything has to be memorised, it's inevitable that the performance won't have that “precision”. Does this bother you?’ He goes back to the comments I'd heard him make many times before and waxes quite lyrical: ‘Every note has got to have some kind of attack, some way of proceeding. You've got to put something down. To put nothing down wouldn't give any indication. There are so many ways to perform each note. So my notation is a starting point. This way it's clear what I don't want too. As far as the stage is concerned, I don't put a lot of dynamics in for the voice. I think that the lines, the words, they help define the way to sing the line.’

We next discuss the Minotaur, and his ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ character (Birtwistle's words). The composer explains, as he has done to others, that the dream-sequences (when the Minotaur transforms into a man) are needed so that he can use Tomlinson's singing voice. I observe that the man-part of the Minotaur is quite unpleasant; he doesn't seem to show much remorse – except for his own situation. Birtwistle considers this: ‘I don't think people like that do show remorse’. I try again: ‘But when he's actually questioning himself, he doesn't dwell on the damage he's done’. Birtwistle says firmly, ‘It's a myth. You can't go questioning a myth. But he has this aspect of himself where, when he's a man, he questions his whole existence.’ I persist in asking about his understanding the damage of his actions. Birtwistle replies, ‘Well, that's when he's a beast. We don't know what these rottweilers think when they attack little children. We can't get inside their brain. In the dream – I think – he's remorseful.’ So I raise an issue about the Minotaur's dream that has perplexed me: ‘Ariadne appears in the dream, and hears the Minotaur talk about the Oracle. Then, having heard this in the dream, in “real life”, she goes to the Oracle. So the dream-world and reality are mixed here?’ Birtwistle admits this, and says, ‘I would have made it clearer. What she should do, in the next scene, she should say, “I had a dream”.’ Our discussion turns back to scenes of the Minotaur goring the Innocents. ‘Those poor girls!’, Birtwistle remarks with what I assume is mock pity.

Monday, 3 March: first day of rehearsal

Rehearsal Room 2 at the Royal Opera House is a tall box of a room. The floor is almost completely filled by a large stage – though smaller than that of the auditorium – which is circular and raked. Embracing the back two-thirds of the stage are curved walls about eight feet high with two exit spots; these are actually stalls in which the chorus will sit. I see what Birtwistle meant about the ‘bullring’. The colours are drab, as in the production of Gawain (also designed by Alison Chitty). My early arrival gives me a chance to talk to Johan Reuter (Theseus) who is also early. He tells me that he has worked on his part at home in Copenhagen. He has talked to Birtwistle – sang for him in the summer of 2005. Afterwards, Birtwistle ‘changed some things to accommodate his voice’.

The rehearsal begins with the main characters seated in a small group in front of the stage. Tony Pappano is in a tall conductor's chair; Birtwistle is on his left and Susie Stranders, the repetiteur, at the grand piano on his right. The principals (only Christine Rice [Ariadne] and Johan Reuter [Theseus] at first) face the conductor. Stephen Langridge, the producer, is over to the conductor's left, often standing up. Beyond him are various other members of the production staff. This is an intensive rehearsal of scene 1 which calls upon the singers' work already done. Christine Rice has a full, carrying voice and a particularly good chest voice (a requirement for her part!). Johan Reuter is assured, his voice ringing out.

Every note is considered. Birtwistle is particularly concerned with the pick-ups: they're always very short in the score (e. g., ‘The’ in ‘The moon’) and the tendency of the singers is to string them out a little. During this session, which lasts until noon, Tony Pappano is very concerned with co-ordination, and the voice/orchestra relationship: for instance, he claims that Ariadne's line, ‘Except where I stand’, provokes ‘a reaction’ from the orchestra. Her lines are very often ad lib; a group of instruments works with her in her tempo while the rest of the orchestra moves in a fixed, separate, tempo. At certain points everything comes together. This, of course, poses a challenge to the conductor (and sub-conductor). It's particularly difficult for the repetiteur: at ‘Now they are here’ in scene 1, the piano, a split personality, stands for both the Ariadne group and the rest of the orchestra. Birtwistle wants Christine Rice to make the difference between arioso singing and factual delivery. Of ‘The moon …’, he says, ‘make a moment out of this’. He tells her, ‘At the beginning you're singing to anyone who will listen. The ship – that's very factual, not “aria”: it's telling the facts. Then it goes back again – “the wind” and all that …’ In the break I ask Birtwistle why he changed a particular few notes: they are in a refrain which elsewhere remains the same. He shrugs: ‘I changed it because he [Johan Reuter] wanted me to’.

At 12. 20 the session resumes with scene 2, ‘The Choice’, still with the two main characters, Theseus and Ariadne. Birtwistle and Tony Pappano spend much of the time on the words. Pappano: ‘“Asterios” – Harry says it's a key word … sculpt it in the audience's mind!’ He also picks out: ‘They are spo-ken for … marked’ … (‘I need the front of those’) ‘Who are’ … ‘You are’ …To Birtwistle: ‘Do you want it on the string?’ Birtwistle: ‘I never know what that means’. Pappano: ‘Do you want it da-da-da–?’ Birtwistle: ‘No’. The rehearsal continues intensely in this detailed fashion. There is a light moment when Johan sings ‘quay’ as ‘kay’. He's given the right pronunciation, which astonishes him. But he can't get it into his head, and repeats his mistake: a measure of how thoroughly he has learned his part. They work on his characterisation: ‘Maximum arrogance!’ says Birtwistle. A little later: ‘He's an arrogant little bugger … he doesn't like the woman either’. (‘Little’ seems a strange word to describe Reuter, a strapping young man!) Some issues of pronunciation arise with regard to the Greek words. They phone up Harsent, who says ‘Dee′-da-lus’. How do they get their notes in this dissonant work? A quick insight – at bar 185, Rice says she gets hers from her previous phrase (before a gap of several bars' rest!) It's ironic: once the singers get together with the orchestra, the remarkable (for Birtwistle) extent of doubling and instrumental support for the vocal lines will become obvious; but by that time, the singers won't require it!

Two and a half hours after they began, Reuter and Rice leave and the rehearsal moves on to scene 6 (‘The Minotaur Dreams’). John Tomlinson arrives for this – what a presence! He sails through his lines, everything done as Birtwistle wants, stresses in all the right places – and a big dramatic personality to boot! He sings his part and also speaks the interjected lines which are intended to be done electronically (from his mirror image). Tony Pappano is impressed: ‘Is it worth thinking about having him do them live?’ Birtwistle (stubbornly): ‘It has to come from the screen’. There's a question about bar 119 and a particular note (Ab or A♮). Birtwistle isn't sure. Tomlinson turns to him: ‘You actually phoned me up. You said, “It wouldn't be an Ab, now, would it?”’ (Laughs!) Of ‘I am Asterios’, Pappano says, ‘It's like in Wozzeck, “Wir arme leut”’. They stop for lunch. Afterwards they move forward to the end of the opera: ‘Death of the Minotaur’. Birtwistle explains to Tomlinson: ‘It's the sort of thing where you try to get up as you die, but you don't have the strength … there's a sword in your back – you're trying to get at it’. Then we get an insight as to how Tomlinson learned his part: ‘I'm waiting for the B and Bb – did that come?’ Pianist: ‘No, sorry’. Tomlinson (joking!): ‘Christ's sake!’

An hour and a half later, Tomlinson leaves and the Innocents arrive to rehearse their part of scene 1. The group sits in a semicircle and sings the difficult music. They are all young and seem rather scared – perhaps this is the first time they've sung with Pappano? They sing ‘I-o’. Birtwistle says that this music has a double function: they are arriving, but it is also a lament. It's very important that they sing ‘I’ with a strong accent. At one point, Pappano claims, ‘I don't sense fear’. Various of the group giggle, ‘Really?’ Then they work on the next scene, ‘The Choice’. The rehearsal ends for the Innocents at 4. 30 p. m., but scene 2 continues with the main characters, who have reappeared.

The question arises as to whether the principals are singing to or past each other in the duet: Birtwistle says, ‘They're telling what they dreamt … they're not dreaming’. Langridge notes, ‘These are interlocking dreams – that's why you [Ariadne] can say [later] that the Oracle [holds the key] – because you can actually go into the Minotaur's dream’. Birtwistle persists: ‘They're telling each other this: I saw this, and you saw that’. Langridge: ‘Somehow they're meeting: “I was lost / I was lost” – but it's not a straightforward conversation’. Birtwistle again: ‘But they're telling each other –’ Christine Rice adds a further complication: ‘Ariadne holds [the word] “streets” – and then can't hear Theseus!’, but Pappano dismisses this: ‘Whether she hears him is immaterial’. Birtwistle has the last word: ‘It's both: they hear and they don't hear’. This is a good example of how he negotiates – he likes to consider both sides of everything!

Saturday, 8 March

I get the chance to converse further with Birtwistle over dinner. He arrives quite elated – he's had an excellent rehearsal with Christine Rice and Tony Pappano for whom he is full of praise. They have been working on the opening of the opera. Pappano suggested that, before it began, someone had asked Ariadne a question such as, ‘What is the moon?’ So her opening lines, ‘The moon's a … . ’, are actually a reply.

Monday, 10 March: rehearsal

Today the two scenes to be rehearsed are the violent ‘bullring’ scenes with the Innocents, which frame Tomlinson's ‘Minotaur Dreams’ scene. They start with scene 5, with Tomlinson and Rebecca (Becky) Bottone, First Innocent – a slip of a girl with a high, clear voice. This includes a rape – a difficult scene! It opens with the Minotaur in the middle of the bullring. The chorus will stand in a semicircle, around and above him, goading him on. Timpanists will stand one at each end of the semicircle, facing each other (the ‘King-Kong effect’ as Pappano will later describe it). The Minotaur tries to speak: the score specifies, ‘SAHHHN!’ then ‘AHHUU!’, ‘THAHH!’ and ‘HNUHHLL!’ Birtwistle offers helpful practical comments: ‘At the beginning you can't get the words out – almost like constipation’. He describes the Minotaur's attitude as being ‘somewhere between pain and ecstasy’! They discuss the drum roll that will give Tomlinson a cue. He practises with Birtwistle, who says, ‘More vowel’. They re-do the scene: Tomlinson is listening for the drum. There are two pianos this time; a snare drum is added at the further piano to give Tomlinson the cue he needs. Birtwistle points out: ‘The first [roar] is your basic bull noise. Then it's “Son / of / the/ Bull”.’ The timps and chorus are not with the Minotaur – they'll need a separate conductor. Of this, Birtwistle says wryly: ‘My attempt at anarchy’.

After the first roars, Bottone comes in (‘The Chase’). Langridge wants Tomlinson to stand at the side of the stage when she enters, but he prefers to be centre stage – ‘more primitive, less thinking’. They go from bar 14; Tomlinson needs the chorus cue. He questions Ariadne's presence in the Labyrinth – he sees it as an anomaly. ‘I'm surprised she's here. In the dream I say, “Who are you?” and Ariadne says, “Don't you know your own blood?”.’ Since he doesn't acknowledge her in the Labyrinth, he decides that he can't really see her. They go through the rape again – it's currently very static. The Minotaur is in the middle of the stage, Bottone is clinging to the walls. The choir's bloodthirsty shouts are performed by various repetiteurs.

At the end of the break, Tomlinson gets back on the stage with Langridge and Philippe Girardeau, the choreographer ready to work out some more moves. Birtwistle, sitting next to Pappano, advises, ‘The sounds [made by the Minotaur] mustn't be too abstract’. Pappano: ‘Have you told him [Tomlinson]?’ Birtwistle: ‘No, I don't want to overload him’. They go from bar 37 again. The actions are getting clearer. Bottone makes a run for it; Tomlinson turns and grabs her wrist, but it's all futile – he knows she can't get away. After they stop, Pappano turns to Tomlinson: ‘We need to do the second dream. But you'll be alone [for the rehearsal] tomorrow’, to which Tomlinson replies, ‘I'll whistle the other parts through. My range is the same as a bass but two octaves higher. Bottom E to top F.’

Back on stage, Tomlinson, always mindful of his cues, observes that it would be helpful to rehearse with the solo instruments. He asks if he will be able to hear them. Pappano replies that he hopes he will: the music is quite sparse. ‘In the places where there's only one instrument they [the orchestra] will get to know it [your part]’. Langridge is working with Bottone on stage. A bucket is needed to hold the blood; it's to be placed behind the back wall. The gored Innocents in each scene can go back there and dip their hands in it – Girardeau shows how. He is obviously a dancer – his moves are graceful. At bar 58 Bottone has to put her hand in the bucket. The high clarinet provokes, and she responds, ‘Aie!’. They work on the ‘Catch’ now. The ‘chorus’ (again, various repetiteurs) cry, ‘Ha ha’ (bar 53), while the piano attempts to represent the high clarinet. Birtwistle asks, ‘Why can't that be the goring? If you want the goring to belong to the music that's the best place.’ They try it again and Langridge assents: ‘Yes, the “ha-ha” could be the goring. I think the structure is going to work.’

Now it's time for scene 7, where all the other Innocents are killed. As in scene 5, the first part includes the Minotaur's grunts as he tries to enunciate words, beginning with ‘Asterios’, then, ‘Man-beast’, ‘Hunchback’, ‘Man-freak’ and ‘Son of the Bull’ again. The subsequent action is divided into sections: four pairs of ‘Passes’ and ‘Kills’, beginning at bar 70. Tomlinson: ‘Is it the same recipe then – goring and raping – though no raping this time?’ Producer and choreographer talk about the Minotaur's moves. Langridge: ‘Often times the bull does nothing. Saw that in Spain actually. Then it suddenly rears around.’ (This is to become the very effective premise for all the bullring scenes.) The Innocents sing the fast ‘a-la-lai’ extremely well; it helps that the pitches aren't specified! Pappano (pleased with the pun): ‘It's the ‘Alalalai chorus!’ The rehearsal stops at 5. 30.

Monday, 17 March: rehearsal

Again the singers' rehearsal is in Rehearsal Room 2. Most of the morning is taken up with the two final scenes, with Tomlinson and Reuter the only two soloists present. Pappano is at a tuba rehearsal so Chris Willis (one of the main ROH repetiteurs and assistant conductor) is in charge. They rehearse scene 12 in which the two protagonists hold their duel. Birtwistle complains about the piano score: on p. 338, sextuplet tremolo chords are shown in full in the first bar, but are given in short-hand afterwards (marked ‘quasi trillo sim.’ above block chords). There are two or three other instrumental voices here as well. Susie Stranders plays the short-hand version, expeditiously omitting the tremolo-continuation; Birtwistle wants to hear it, though. He also wants the brass chords brought out – these are written as ‘ossias’ above the piano line. This certainly requires more than ten fingers! Birtwistle, the two pianists and Willis confer. They decide to add the other piano – the only way to get all of this across! By noon, Birtwistle has disappeared – presumably to the tuba rehearsal. They get to the point where the Minotaur recognises Theseus from his dream and gradually achieves speech, eventually articulating, ‘It was you!’. Birtwistle, having returned, listens to Tomlinson's rendition: ‘John, do it with the accents now: “I - wa – a –”. It's almost there.’

After lunch, the chorus arrives with their director, Renato Balsadonna. Willis is conducting. They concentrate on the baying shouts, ‘Theseus!/Asterios!’ It's tricky: they have to count a mixture of 3/8 and 5/16 bars, all quite fast. Willis advises them: ‘Always hear that “Am-ster-dam” rhythm in the timps’ (i. e. the on-stage drums). Birtwistle, going back to comments he made several rehearsals ago to the principals, points out that in ‘As-ter-i-os’, the pick-up is shorter. He also wants a shorter ‘Nai’ at bar 110 (where they all shout, ‘Nai nai nai nai nai…’). He is leaving for the first orchestral run-through, so I accompany him.

The orchestra is in the pit in the main auditorium. There are very few people in the darkened hall. Pappano is on the podium. Birtwistle surveys the ensemble. He sees two lots of percussion in the boxes at either side. Where are the others? Pappano points them out down in the pit. The issue of working with the two separate tempo-groups appears from the start. Pappano has a solution that doesn't please Birtwistle at bar 179. He tells the ad lib. group that their chords will occur ‘just after 1, just before 2, just after 4’, etc. In other words, he's co-ordinating them with the main group. But of course, they are supposed to be interjected between Ariadne's (free) lines. Birtwistle isn't happy, but this solution is temporary – Pappano wants to get through as much of the score as possible today in this run-through, so this is a convenient solution for the moment. The rehearsal reaches the end of the first act (‘part’). Pappano: ‘I've no idea what's happening at the end of the 7th scene.’ Then: ‘Sorry Harry – we'll get there!’.

Thursday, 3 April: rehearsal

This is the first rehearsal I've attended with the singers in the main auditorium. Today it's accompanied by piano (the inimitable Susie Stranders). Harsent and I arrive at the same time. We join Birtwistle, who is already sitting in the dark auditorium in front of his huge score. They chat for a while: Solaris is discussed briefly; I sense that Birtwistle's interest in this work is still alive.Footnote ⁹ (I realise later that the novel's reference to the sea as a living brain uncannily reflects the sea-videos for the toccatas.) On the stage, the end of the opera is being rehearsed, from scene 11, where Ariadne gives Theseus the ball of twine – a very large, glowing, pink ball of twine – and he goes down the ladder into the labyrinth (through a trap-door mid-stage). At the end of this scene the back scrim comes down. Onto it is projected an electronic version of a labyrinth – like a board-game – which shows the progress of the pink string as Theseus journeys to his goal. (For me, this invokes the journey in Gawain.) Then the curtain goes up; the Minotaur is standing in the middle of the bullring, as usual. Theseus appears at the back, on top of the wall, singing the same phrase with which he ended the previous scene, ‘Io dike phaneitai!’ (roughly, ‘Justice will be done!’), and jumps down towards the Minotaur. At the end, the dying Minotaur seems to blend into the scenery. The Ker screeches in. I realise later that, though the libretto indicates that, in the distance, the black-sailed boat is seen sailing way, no such ship is to be seen.

Thursday evening, 3 April: ‘Insight Evening’

This event takes place in the ‘Clore Studio Upstairs’ at the Royal Opera House. The seats (about 150 of them) are full, and the audience looks intense – they're all here to learn about the opera. Tom Service, from the BBC, in the chair, sits at the end of a long table; next to him are Birtwistle and Harsent, then Alison Chitty and Stephen Langridge. Service raises the usual opening issues – how did you get started? Birtwistle offers his by-now well-known approach: ‘I'm not a composer who looks for subject matter’. Then he explains that he ‘couldn't set something modern’ – ordinary language is not for him. He says only that he wanted ‘something suitable for John Tomlinson’. He invokes his usual refrain: ‘Auden said the best librettos are a dumbshow’. He adds, ‘If you can't understand the opera, the words aren't going to help you!’ and then, ‘Essentially for me, opera is about music’. The weight of this particular opera's theme is left to Harsent to impart: he keeps coming back to the same phrase, ‘I looked through the eyes of the beast to find the man’ (i.e. the man is little better than the beast). His other catchphrase is ‘Why Naxos?’, though he doesn't explain it to the audience. (It refers to the puzzle as to what happened to the relationship between Ariadne and Theseus there.) There's a discussion of the characters: Harsent proclaims, ‘For me the only truly innocent person involved is the Minotaur. Ariadne and Theseus have a corrupt pact. The Minotaur was born like that.’ There is a question about the Innocents: in the myth, some are saved. Harsent declares, ‘In my version they all die’.

The discussion moves to ‘mechanics’ – how do you make it work? Alison Chitty explains that the main question about the Labyrinth was, ‘Can we put it in shape in two hours and strike it in one?’ (This is because the theatre is used for another production on the nights after the Minotaur rehearsals.) Birtwistle mentions the ending: he and Harsent had conjured up a long section at the end where the birds ate the Minotaur. But ultimately, they decided to dispatch him quickly. Birtwistle illustrates this with a story about Harrison Ford where the film actor was similarly contemplating a convoluted send-off of some threatening thing. In the end he simply said, ‘Why don't I just take out my gun and shoot the f****r?’ General laughter!

Pappano comes in. He is asked about his experience of Birtwistle's music. He waxes lyrical: ‘It has a natural unforced depth and power that's unusual for modern music. It's challenging to the ear – but there are great depths to the orchestral music.’ He observes that it's also wonderfully written for the voices: ‘Through-and-through operatic’. He then goes over to the piano. Stranders is sitting there, attentive. He promises to give the audience a flavour of the music. At this point, Birtwistle strongly objects – he announces that the piano reduction won't sound a thing like the orchestral music! Pappano continues unchastened. He introduces the opening: ‘The main colour is one of darkness. Different threads of melodic material … the piece is woven…’ Pappano and Stranders, he conducting and describing, she playing, offer us a tour de force. Pappano is a real magician! Everyone claps enthusiastically.

At the end of the evening, Birtwistle speaks quite intimately of his compositional challenge: ‘Since music exists in time, the most difficult thing is to calculate how much time you're creating. A page of notes takes a day or at least half a day – and there are 400 pages, each lasting about ten seconds. You have to compose every single increment of that gesture. How do you control time slowed down?’

Friday, 4 April: rehearsal

Another rehearsal in the auditorium – the first with singers and orchestra. Before that I meet with Harsent and we spend about forty-five minutes in the coffee bar discussing the libretto. His various refrains come up: ‘Why Naxos?’; ‘I look into the eyes of the beast and see the man’. He tells me that he had wanted to include another incident at the end of the opera: Theseus raping Ariadne, to show that the Man is no better than the Beast. But, for now, Harsent defends Theseus: he does consider the mothers and the children, and expresses compassion. He's impelled by duty. I ask about the Innocents, and why they are all killed, despite some being saved in the myth. Harsent shrugged and smiled: ‘At a fairly early stage, Harry decided to kill them all … it was his “Hannibal Lector” moment!’

In the auditorium they're rehearsing the fourth scene – Ariadne's scene. She is standing in front of the curtain, next to a bull's head, but it has no body – on which, according to the libretto, Ariadne is meant to drape herself as she recounts her mother's coupling with the bull and the birth of Asterios. The voyeuristic aspect is lost: Ariadne's words and actions (or lack of them) don't match. It's surprisingly timid! Harsent tells me that ‘They gave her peony and yarrow… fenugreek and shepherd's purse … camomile, geranium, angelica’ is taken from another opera libretto he wrote; it wasn't used because that particular composer (whom he named) asked, ‘How can I possibly set such words?’ The rehearsal moves to scene 5 via a breath-taking scene change – Ariadne remains at the front, stage-right; the Minotaur first appears behind a scrim and looks like a distant model, as he's further back. Then the gauze is lifted and we see the bullring complete with chorus. The Minotaur seems to achieve full size; the Innocent (Bottone) seems tiny. The chorus sings its regret – an important ingredient. The Ker's ‘Mine, mine, mine’ – each word spoken at normal, lowish, pitch interspersed between hysterical screams – sounds faintly farcical.

As we listen, Harsent points out to me some of Birtwistle's ‘mis-setting’ – not stressing a particular word in the line that he (Harsent) wants stressed (‘My death or the Minotaur's or both’ comes out as ‘My death …’). He also tells me that in Gawain, he wrote a number of riddles, each varied and carefully crafted to its particular context; but when Birtwistle came to set them, he set the same words each time. Later, brightening, he tells me how he created the Snake Priestess's words: he wrote a line, changed ordinary words to extravagant words (for example – ‘go to the door’ might become ‘journey to the aperture’), then changed the word order, anagrammatised everything and reconstructed the anagrams to make them singable. I remark that there is a doctoral dissertation in that, once people have given up trying to unravel Birtwistle's pitch system!

Meanwhile the rehearsal goes on. It's scene 5 – the rape scene again. The crowd is still too quiet; radio mikes are added. Birtwistle requests that in ‘Man-freak’ we must hear both words at the same level. It's decided that the choir's ‘hymn’ to the dead Innocents will be ‘not in the house’. (Not amplified.) After ‘her eye loses its light’ (bar 81), the choir is miked again, but it brings out some obvious vibrato amongst the top sopranos. Birtwistle remarks that switching the mikes off at this point might make us realise that they were switched on before. After ‘Mine, mine mine’, the Keres pluck out hearts which look like they're made of pink plastic. (Lighting will alter this.) In the toccata that follows, we hear the heaving breathing of low brass – very effective.

Now it's scene 6, ‘The Minotaur Dreams’. The amplified, spoken Minotaur part is very loud, and a bit crass. We constantly hear sung, ‘As-ter-i-os’, while in Tomlinson's speaking, it's ‘As-ter-i-os’. End of scene; back to the bullring for scene 7. Rather anachronistically, a girl with headphones walks on stage, breaking the spell: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you will have a little more time than that’. The Innocents rush off stage in turn to dip their hands in the ‘blood bucket’ and come back rubbing the gore across their chests. They tremble to death at the front of the stage. Birtwistle and Balsadonna discuss the chorus and the microphones – Birtwistle: ‘It's a lot better’. When Ker 1 (Amanda Echalaz) sings with a huge voice, ‘Their tripes, their lights’, I can hear Gawain-type accompaniment.

After attending the rehearsal, I get home at about 3 p.m. to find an e-mail awaiting me from the ROH telling me that ‘there's been a change to the Minotaur production, which affects the end of your essay… We do NOT now in fact see the ship at the end of the drama.’ There are requests for a few other changes in the programme essay. They are that I should temper my observations concerning Theseus's scorn for Ariadne and the two sexually charged scenes (Ariadne's mildly masturbatory scene 4, and the rape of the Minotaur's first female victim, both of which have been sanitised). I am also requested to delete some comments about the libretto's stock gender treatment of Ariadne and Theseus…

Monday, 7 April

I phone Birtwistle to get his opinion of the changes. Does he think the new ending negates the notion that the story continues after the end of the opera? He's quite emphatic that it doesn't: ‘We know what happens to them [Ariadne and Theseus]’. But he is concerned that there will be no black sails visible … He thinks about it briefly and immediately resigns himself to it – ‘It's technically difficult to strike the bullring’. ‘Does the bullring need to be struck in order to show the ship leaving in the distance?’ ‘Of course!’ Then I ask him whether Theseus is attracted to Ariadne. He thinks for a moment: ‘Oh … surely … at some level!’ He admits what Harsent had told me earlier, that they had originally contemplated a different ending: after Theseus had slain the Minotaur, Ariadne would come back on stage and Theseus would rape her. Anyway, I reflect, most of the requested changes allow my essay to conform more closely to the production (if not always the score/libretto).

Saturday, 12 April 2008, 11 a. m. : general rehearsal

The dress rehearsal is given to quite a full house. I am up in the ‘gods’ with about twelve students from City University. This is the first time I've seen the full production – and the first time I've sat so far away from the performers, but everything is (almost) totally audible. The first scene starts slowly. Ariadne's big voice impresses. The lighting is striking. This stage has much more depth than the rehearsal stage, and everything visual improves as a result. When the Innocents step out of the gloomy boat into a depression in the stage, they look so small and frail (actually, short). Theseus stands apart from the group: he's tall and strong (heroic!). His voice stands out too – rich and incisive. His Euro accent takes some getting used to; the surtitles help here. The Minotaur is definitely the ‘star’; his scenes are strategically placed, and when he is on stage, he's utterly the focus of the action. He looks the part too; the semi-transparent bull's head is very effective. A light shines onto his face from inside this head in the dream-scenes – now perhaps he's a little too human? The sound quality of the spoken part has been deftly honed; Tomlinson's speaking voice is quiet and calming. The rape in scene 5 takes place at the extreme left of the bullring – almost out of my sight. Afterwards, Bottone gropes her way across the floor of the stage very dramatically, singing bravely the while. For scene 10, ‘The Oracle at Psychro’, which I have not seen in rehearsal, I had imagined, via the score and its colourful music (with off-stage choral gibberish), a fantastical setting. But now the mostly empty set offers little respite from the dark tones of the Labyrinth. The singing is of the same high calibre as the rest of the opera: Andrew Watts, countertenor, is the Snake Priestess, and Philip Langridge, tenor (father of Stephen, and an ‘old Birtwistle hand’, still in fine voice!), the translater, Hiereus. Watts stands centrally on a high plinth, his long ‘skirt’ covering it, his ‘breasts’ mightily pointing outwards, Madonna-like. He stares at us from under his head-dress, open-eyed, impressive, while Hiereus stomps around the circular stage, bossy and severe.

The toccatas are ‘accompanied’ by video clips, impressive close-ups of a slowly moving, heaving sea, all slightly different from each other (though I note that a similar clip opens the opera too, for music which isn't a toccata!). For scene 3, its orchestral music punctuated by the cries of the Innocents, amplified singers, placed in the top tiers of the auditorium provide a ‘surround-sound’ effect (slightly reminiscent of Stockhausen's Donnerstag where the singer ran along the ROH corridors shouting ‘Knarr’) for their journey down through the Labyrinth, visually represented by ladders at the back of the stage. In scene 4, the pizzicatos that introduce Ariadne put you ‘on the alert’; this is true at the end of the opera too, where bass pizzicatos accompany Asterios's ‘Now I can speak’. The drummers, standing opposite each other, play small drums – with music! – for the ‘King Kong’ effect. The music of the Minotaur's death stroke is memorable – after ‘now is the right time – to die’ (uttered unaccompanied) the orchestral chord dramatically dissipates into the chorus's sigh, ‘Ahh’ – a vicarious release of the communal breath! A very different memorable sound is that of the high screams of the Innocents with stratospheric clarinets at the end of scene 7 (when the former are eviscerated by the Keres); this is probably the most chillingly horrifying sound I've ever heard in any musical production.

There are some exceedingly lovely moments too. As for the chorus, the amplification has been sorted out and the ‘hymns’ are beautifully blended. At the end of scene 6, the Minotaur's first dream sequence, the long quiet sustained orchestral interlude is gently placating; soft woodwind in unison is a sound rarely heard in Birtwistle's music. At the end of scene 8, Ariadne's moving lament adds considerable musical depth to her portrayal. But the oboe accompaniment to Asterios's last soliloquy, I realise at this hearing, is as significant as any of Ariadne's saxophone accompaniments. The oboe, responding freely to Asterios's ad lib. phrases, becomes his/its mouthpiece, as expressive of plaintive grief as an obbligato line in a Bach Passion.

Tuesday, 15 April: première

Seeing the opera from the orchestra stalls gives another perspective (also sound-world) entirely. From ground level, the four percussionists placed in boxes next to the stage on either side protrude from the orchestral texture – heard from the ‘gods’ they didn't. (In Gawain, the extra strings were placed in these boxes.) The atmosphere is different too – this first-night audience demands to be entertained! In the event, they are appreciative. The power of the work is hard to imagine. It's quite a shock – the very sudden ending; everyone is left stunned. Almost all the reviews in the next days are highly favourable; all are bowled over by John Tomlinson. This première has been a great success.