IGI's little excerpt there looks and sounds (when read aloud) like poetry to me. Even the most conservative definition of poetry would characterise it principally as literary work in metrical/versified form, which that certainly is. One can also easily see and hear that this poetry lends itself to a musical setting, on account of the way the vowels are cleverly laid out - this is I think harder to do in English than in many other languages (German and Italian in particular) whose vowels are more open and clearly-delineated.

Having seen an opera by a female composer (Judith Weir's A Night at the Chinese Opera) only last Friday, I at least have recent experience of the other side of the coin, if we're discussing the gender of operas. It's difficult to know where to start with comparisons, though: it's a more elliptical piece, certainly, with many more laughs: the orchestration is delicate and subtle, and the (self-penned) libretto is concise. It contains a fair number of deaths, though mostly in the central act, with its premise of three semi-retired Chinese thespians recreating a version of a famous Chinese play, and they're treated with humour. It's sharp, rather than dark, maybe, but the characters are still cyphers. The impact of an invasion on China is seen with reference to a single family, and its similarities to, and contrasts with, the existing Chinese drama, with tragic results.

Apart from the three 'actors', there is little involvement with the characters as such, making the piece in some ways rather inscrutable. I'm not sure that a spectator innocent of the composer's gender would automatically guess that it was a work by a woman, though.... At this point it would be useful to have access to Thea Musgrave's considerable operatic output, too.


John, quite apart from the fact that you clearly seem to have a somewhat non-standard view of what poetry is, do you really have that much experience of opera libretti to be able to determine when one is weak? Birtwistle has a proven track record of selecting very fine librettists: it's not the first time he's collaborated with Harsent, and the overwhelming view from those who actually know about such things is that it's a strong libretto, very well suited to its purpose.

 Can you really not see the poetry in the excerpt that IGI has provided? Look at the music of the second stanza, the pattern of vowel sounds mentioned by r is very apparent: the consonance of the 'ee' sound in 'dreams' and 'seem'; there's also the alliterative continuation of the 'm' through to two syllables of 'remember'. The sibilance of the 's' is carried right through, with only two lines devoid of one. The ritual repetition of words is there too, forming a chain of brief linked pictures, like stepping stones of thought towards the climax of the image, which is underlined by a half-rhyme (moon/dawn) which is preferable a full rhyme in this case because there have already been so many exact repetitions. Look at that last line, too, and how the sounds of the syllables in 'rose-pearl light' move upwards from darkness to light, mirroring the way that the aspirational imagery has worked its way upwards (from the sea to rock to trees to moon to  sky). That's craft of the highest order, not just 'a clever use of words' and would certainly count for poetry in my book.

Hello Mary.
I think I'd want a touch more evidence before countenancing the claim that the response is gendered.

You use the word 'symbol' rather than 'myth', but it is perhaps appropriate that some composers begome engaged with myths, which surely articulate powerful and enduring aspects of human experience.  Others may concern themselves with...well (to choose a random example) outsiders, the corruption of innocence and other late-modern themes, which are usually very personalized.  Important, no doubt: but myths and symbols capture another dimension of what it is to be human, at least as significant and, who knows, perhaps more enduring.

Yes they do, but while you can easily substitute "male" for "human" in that statement, it doesn't sound so convincing if you substitute "female", does it? My feeling is that a treatment of myth which doesn't take that somehow explicitly into account could well be regarded as "gendered". (I'm not going to stick my neck out any further until the DVD arrives from Carnoustie!  )

But that's typical of opera anyway, isn't it? Nobody watches opera in order to "know what happens next"; it isn't a medium suited to suspense.

Aha! But what about the second time? and the twentieth? You know exactly what's going to happen but (as I would put it) your interaction with the music and the drama retells it in a different way, comparable to your examples of Greek Tragedy or Birtwistle, right?

It partly depends on how good the performance is - I have certainly seen performances of Jenufa that draw one so intensely into the work one seems to be experiencing it for the first time, so that the moments of violence that define the plot genuinely shock, but then Jenufa is that sort of extraordinary work.


 ... Although I felt that in creating the character of the Minotaur, Birtwistle was moving further into the territory of the personal than he has before in his operas (although there were perhaps hints of that in The Io Passion); it is interesting that the final scene was consciously modelled on the earlier example of Boris Godunov, and I did wonder whether it was significant that this most personal of scenes needed that external model.  It was here that the excellence of the libretto was so clear, too; in earlier works there  has been a tendency for Birtwistle's libretto to verge on the bathetic (I'm thinking of the rectitations of the sheep chorus in Yan Tan Tethera, reflecting on their daily routine in hieratic language that may have been meant to be ironic but didn't really work, IMO).  But it didn't happen here.

One passage that seemed to me to be particularly powerful was the scene in the first act where Theseus and Ariadne were both relating their life stories, demonstrating the same life-trajectory from different points of view - a very Birtwistle moment, that, and a metaphor for his own compositional technique too.  But it was, I agree, a moment that elicited an intellectual rather than an emotional response.

Yes, but has that stopped you watching Hitchcock movies a second time?