Transforming a
Cold War dystopian drama into a visionary, immersive opera is a task that might
well defeat the faint-hearted. Not so Luca Francesconi, the composer of Quartett. Much acclaimed upon its
premiere at La Scala, Milan three years ago, the work sets Heiner Müller’s 1980
play of the same title as an opera for two singers plus a cutting-edge
mix of live and pre-recorded instrumentation.
The play is based partly
on Les liaisons dangereuses by
Laclos, but takes place in a concrete bunker in which the protagonists are the
last people left alive after World War III. They convey multiple realities as Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil undergo an intense succession of role-play. Francesconi has created a range of
music to match and John Fulljames, the Royal Opera House’s associate director
of opera, has been tasked with the work’s first UK production, about to open at
the ROH’s Linbury Studio.
“It’s an
extraordinary play – dark, ambiguous and open in terms of the way it’s staged,”
says Fulljames. “The drama goes from the most intimate to the most epic and the
most political: these two trapped people are somehow the entirety of humanity.
The political ambition as well as the emotional ambition of the work is
extraordinarily high.”
Francesconi, the
Italian former pupil of Karlheinz Stockhausen, radical pioneer of electronic music,
has made the most of today’s music technologies, using them to enhance and
transform the work’s message. Two orchestras are involved: one plays live, and the
second is pre-recorded, sampled, treated, and then, Fulljames suggests, its
sounds seem to slide over the heads of the audience: “The aural landscape and
what it demands technically creates a new possibility for opera,” he says.
“I think it’s that
second orchestra that makes the audience feel as if they’re immersed in the
middle of the piece, even though they’re watching it at a distance,” he adds. “They
are implicated within it, trapped in its soundworld. That is a very different
idea of what opera is, rather than the traditional architecture where we sit in
our seats and it takes place over there...”
The pre-recorded
orchestra also adds the element of hope that is absent from Müller’s play. “The
live orchestra is very much associated with the two people in the bunker, but
the pre-recorded one is more environmental, representing what’s happening in
the outside world,” says Fulljames. “It’s the waves, the wind, amoebas, other
life forms which will keep growing and reproducing. Life inside the bunker is
dying, but Francesconi finds hope in the idea that the universe, the ecosystem,
will carry on breathing.”
Despite all this
innovation Quartett is, in
Fulljames’s view, a deeply operatic experience. “Opera has always worked best
when it’s raw and visceral, dealing with emotional extremity – and this one
does,” he says. “I think anyone who enjoys operatic storytelling will get a great
deal from it.”
Quartett, Royal Opera House Linbury Studio, 18-28 June. Box office:
020 7304 4000
