A NEW OPERA is an important event and should be an enjoyable one. Unfortunately, much contemporary music appears to come from what Shaw called the genuine pulpit conscience. As he put the matter: “It annoys me to see people comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable.” The British composer Harrison Birtwistle betrayed just such a conscience on a radio interview, shortly before the premiere of his new opera, Gawain, at London’s Royal Opera House. Speaking of his approach to musical theater, he compared it to a game in which “I make up a set of rules, then rub them out, and don’t tell you what they are.”
The rules in Gawain are not particularly obscure. Birtwistle employs various technical devices (repetition, motifs, cyclical treatment of material, sound effects like blocks to represent the appearance of a horse, even the spacing of notes to—he claims—suggest character); with these he spins out his score and also relates it to abstract concepts, especially Time (it is capitalized like that in the program notes). I do not mean time in the sense of rhythm. Much, indeed most, of the music in Gawain is set like concrete in a rhetorical prose mood which makes any sense of pulse incidental. For about the first ten minutes of the opera, its obsessively dissonant texture, plus violent and crude melodramatic acting, gives off a certain excitement, like the scores of 1960s Hammer horror films. But well before the end of the three-hour opera, the people sitting around me (and they claimed to be fans of Birtwistle’s music) were looking furtively at their watches.
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