Photo by Matthew Lloyd
James Strecker: A Mind of Winter is the first of your three featured works in the Toronto Symphony’s New Creations Festival, so I’d love to know how introspective a work it is. A number of writers and actors have told me how they dig into their lives for material and I wonder if that is the case with you in the music for A Mind of Winter.
George Benjamin: While writing I devote my energies to just one thing: music. That’s enough! But, without the help of some expressive input, I would not be able to find the notes I need, though I would not be able to put such feelings into words. My approach is simple: musical emotion is discovered in the act of composition, and not imposed in advance by will. So no ‘digging’!
JS: How did the poem by Wallace Stevens, used as text, here influence how you set it to music?
GB: My piece is a portrait in sound of the extraordinarily evocative and mysterious Stevens poem, which I knew I wanted to set from the moment I first read it almost 35 years ago. The influence of the poem is evident in my score from the first note to the last, and affects everything from the smallest details to the largest structural element.
JS: I find it gripping, in the version I heard, how near the end the soprano sustains the word “behold,” all the while becoming engulfed by the orchestra and then freed from it before almost speaking the last line in a haunted and vulnerable voice. What response do you yourself go through, as the one who composed it, when you conduct the work?
GB: To serve the singer and the players to the best of my abilities, and to bring the notes I wrote on paper over three decades ago to life in the most vivid and precise way I can.
JS: What is there in your Duet for Piano and Orchestra, featured at the Festival’s second concert, that feels new and innovative to you in the context of your previous work? What about the piece gives you the most satisfaction?
GB: It’s my only concerto! Though, indeed, it’s more of an anti-concerto for the writing for the soloist, in the main, intentionally subverts the habitual requirement for such works to be vehicles for display and virtuosity.
JS: What were the main challenges for you in writing for a solo instrument and an orchestra and how did you effectively maintain the presence of each one?
GB: In terms of sonority my piece attempts to bridge the acoustic chasm between the piano and the orchestra by, in effect, trying to make one sound like the other. And I conceived this piece – like all my works – primarily in dramatic terms, while trying to avoid the conventional “individual against the mass” dialectic found in many works in this form.
JS: I’m sure you’ve heard many responses to your work in general, so could you tell us a few such responses that have pleased you and a few that have been less pleasing, perhaps even troubling.
GB: The response to my two operas has taken me by surprise, though I do feel that collaboration with the English playwright, Martin Crimp, has had something of a transformative effect on my work. But there is one specific incident I would like to recall. In 1993 I completed a complex orchestral piece “Sudden Time”, a score which took several years to conceive. One of its sources of inspiration was a fascinating short film I had seen, by chance, on television by the renowned Canadian animator Norman McLaren – something which I’d never disclosed to anyone. A few months after the premiere, I went to Mumbai and gave a talk about the work to a large and friendly Indian audience who, nevertheless, seemed baffled by what they heard. At the reception afterwards I therefore felt rather isolated – until an architect approached me, with considerably more enthusiasm than his compatriots, to tell me that that my music reminded him of Norman McLaren’s films – a comment I have never forgotten and which, in retrospect, seems to justify that whole trip to India!
JS: You have said that you spent two and a half years devoted solely to the writing of your opera Written on Skin and that you gave up everything else in your life to do so, so I wonder if you might describe for us your emotional and mental states during this time. This was a solitary and intensely focused experience, so how did you keep yourself going?
GB: I immerse myself in my work to a rather extreme degree. Once things begin, it’s very hard for me not to be inhabited by what I’m writing during all waking hours -and probably quite a few dreams too. A task as gigantic as an opera therefore requires uninterrupted concentration on the task in hand, so I virtually stop teaching, reduce my travelling to almost nil and refuse conducting engagements. The hope is to submerge oneself to such an extent that the compositional process begins to flow and, eventually snowball. Though onerous, it’s also a thrilling journey, watching the seasons pass as, scene by scene, the work expands.
JS: You have also said that “the challenge is to make opera seem natural in the 21st century, which is not necessarily so easy.” Please tell us more.
GB: We live in an era – now almost a hundred years old – which has been dominated by the movies. Modern opera can often seem arch or contrived in comparison and one of the challenges, I believe, is to by-pass the dominating influence of cinema and try to give opera – with its strange conventions, but also its uniquely magical potency – the illusion of naturalness. Acknowledging its artificiality from the first bar has been one of the approaches that Martin Crimp and I have adopted in the hope that, once achieved, expressive immediacy will – paradoxically – be strengthened.
JS: You talk about getting the singers to do what you want and I wonder if you might clarify with an example or two what you are requesting of them in Written on Skin.
GB: I designed the opera for the singers who premiered the work –so magnificently – in Aix en Provence in July 2012. And when I say “designed” I mean that: every line was conceived specifically to match and expose their vocal talents and strengths, their roles shaped according to what I discovered when we initially met and played through lieder together before I started composing. Two of these singers, I’m delighted to say – Barbara Hannigan and Chris Purves – will be appearing in the forthcoming performance in Toronto.
A specific example: Barbara has an exquisite high G#, while Chris’ “purple” note in is a top E. In response, these precise pitches are saved for specific moments in the work, and lines given to Agnes and The Protector frequently gravitate around them. In turn the orchestra – and the harmonic environment, a particularly important element for me- are influenced and shaped according to these notes, both short and long-term.
So the ramifications of my early contact with these singers were far from incidental. I should perhaps add, however, that other singers have taken all the roles in this opera in new productions since its premiere and in a highly convincing way too; that, for me, has been a very interesting process.
JS: Some composers have told me that it is sometimes very difficult getting musicians to understand what they specifically want of an orchestra. Have you had this experience?
GB: I have loved the orchestra passionately since my childhood and have conducted hundreds of concerts over the years so perhaps, by now, I know how to achieve what I imagine – though that doesn’t mean that, from time to time, I don’t still make mistakes! But I also often make contact with musicians, while writing, to see if things I conceive are both possible and effective.
JS: Since you studied with Olivier Messiaen in the 1970s, please tell us what that experience was like. Has there been any impact from knowing Messiaen on how you yourself teach?
GB: I cannot imagine myself – or, indeed, anyone – being able to match the subtlety, devotion, enthusiasm and wisdom that Messiaen was able to give his students. But, all the same, I do greatly enjoy my post at King’s College London and I try, to the best of my abilities, to follow the main tenets displayed by my beloved Maitre: to respect a student’s personality and specific talents, to increase their technical capacities, to open their minds and ears and, finally, to help them become themselves.