Finally, yesterday evening, I managed to set aside the time and space to watch The Minotaur in its entirety.

Firstly I would exactly echo Ruth's comments on the production. I think that with violent onstage deaths like those in this opera it's better either to do them much more "graphically", or (as in Greek tragedy) to leave them out of the onstage action altogether. The Keres reminded me a bit of the Batley Townswomen's Guild in Monty Python reenacting the battle of Pearl Harbor, and their repetitions of the word "mine" reminded me more than a bit of the seagulls in Finding Nemo... again, understatement would probably have been all the more powerful here.

Secondly, the characterlessness of the vocal lines got on my nerves after a very short time (all those meandering chromatic lines which end a sentence with a wide descending interval!) - only the title character has anything memorable to sing. Hardly any of the singing seemed to be done at dynamic levels much lower than "barking", and the chorus in the labyrinth I found unnecessary and confusing, seemingly answering no need other than that of having a chorus there since this was a piece for an opera house.

There were moments I found very striking in the orchestral writing, but by and large it seemed to me fairly routine by Birtwistle's standards, centring on the usual slow melodic thread or "cantus" (which hasn't changed much since The Triumph of Time in 1972) surrounded by counterpoints and/or rhythmical patterns, and I think the nature of the piece would have been better served by not using a standard orchestra at all but inventing a new sound for the piece (as HB did in Punch and Judy and the Mask of Orpheus).

The ending seemed to me a bit arbitrary, as if David Harsent couldn't decide on what to do after the Minotaur's death but thought there ought to be something to bring the curtain down on.

But over and above all these things, I wasn't sure really what the point of the whole thing was. What was this treatment of myth supposed to be showing us? What relevance does it have? (Does an opera need relevance?)

So that's my first reaction, very late I know, excuse me for resurrecting an old thread just to add my two cents' worth.

Richard,

I agree with your comment about the vocals, and I posted my own comments somewhere on this thread. Since I have often been negative about contemporary music, my comments were dismissed, I think by Ron. I wait to see if he will similarly dismiss your comments. 

- heh, heh, but of course you are 'more informed' on the subject/genre so your comments probably won't be dismissed but regarded as something worth discussing 

Richard, since you have listened to more contemporary music than I have, I expect you have expressed a negative opinion of examples of the genre on more occasions than I have 


John

I've read this thread from the sidelines, since a mixture of bad luck and bad planning prevented me from either seeing or hearing THE MINOTAUR - so I soak-up the reactions of others vicariously.  I hope it will be back at the ROH in future seasons sometime.

Does opera "need" relevance?  I think the answer must be a resounding yes, surely?  It's a search for relevance and meaning that sets modern producers off to mine "repertoire" works for the relevances they may have for us today - a search which isn't always productive. 

Whatever the final results may be, I can't imagine ANYONE trying to put on any kind of piece in a theatre without having "something to say"??    Whether they achieve in saying it will depend on a lot of factors - some under their control, and others beyond it - but there ought to be some kind of "conclusion" of a moral or philosophical nature to a show,  so that it's not merely just a pretty but empty ramble?

Every work of art is seriously flawed.
Every human being is seriously flawed.
We live in an imperfect universe.
But a serious flaw can be seriously beautiful.
I haven't heard the minotaur so I can't contribute.
Other than to say this.

The Minotaur is certainly not very pretty. But what it had "to say" leaves me at a loss. To make a Birtwistlian comparison, The Mask of Orpheus, with all its multiple events, masks and inscrutabilities, seemed to say something I would be hard put to boil down into words not just about the Orpheus myth but about the nature and purpose of myth, about why these archaic stories echo down the millennia still with such immediacy, about how there is no one story but a multiplicity of manifestations of something like Lévi-Strauss's "universal laws" of myth, and so on. The Minotaur is to me more like Richard Strauss's later mythological operas: it's based on a story which someone must have thought "would make a good opera" after which all the bits fall into their operatic places, even including stock personages and scenes like the nasty underworld chorus (cf. Gluck), the oracle (cf. Erda), the death scene à la Boris and so on. To me it seems so much less ambitious as an artwork than Orpheus or Punch - it seems to succeed efficiently in doing what it sets out to do, but I was left thinking "so what".

However. I'm giving it a hard time because my expectations were so high and because my interest in Birtwistle is centred on the more innovative aspects of his output. He's just "not that hero", as Gawain says.

Let me echo t-i-n's comments, and add that I don't accept at all that the views on a piece of music of a practitioner, an academic, or whoever - many of whom (including myself) have a vested interest in the continued promotion and subsidy of modernist music - are any more valid or important than those of anyone else. The 'what do you know' response, to those who feel estranged from certain music, or unconvinced by certain claims made for it, whilst still being expected to support it through their taxes, is snobbery of the worst type, and only reinforces the case of those who argue that new music is a self-serving pastime of an elite.

Yes, I think so: if you look back, Ron's response to John's original comment on this thread was not a dismissal but a reasoned and thoughtful response which took the conversation in an interesting direction. I don't see what anyone could object to there. John, a "layman's opinion" is certainly worth hearing but, as usual, you haven't said anything about how and why you come to your opinions, which means they're not really much use at stimulating discussion, which is what we're trying to have here.

Anyway. Tonight I am going to watch Gawain, or at least some of it, to reacquaint myself, although I did go to see it at the time.