Review: "Lessons in Love and Violence"

*CONTAINS SPOILERS*

Photo: Tristram Kenton

It's hard to imagine an opera premiere under more pressure than Lessons in Love and Violence. When George Benjamin and Martin Crimp's second collaboration, Written on Skin, premiered in 2012, people loved it--and with good reason. It's sensuous yet tightly structured, its subject matter is gritty but its orchestration is luminous, and its small cast gets an almost bel canto-esque reign of powerfully effective vocal writing, as virtuosic as it is intensely lyrical. Apparently, it's now performed more often than Peter Grimes, and its almost unanimously positive reviews are being bolstered by  growing musicological attention (witness, adjacently, my undergraduate dissertation, so incorrigibly enthusiastic that you can practically hear me smacking my lips).[1] 

The thing about Written on Skin is that is has an Achilles heel: it's climax-shy. Harmonic and rhythmic complexity builds, orchestration thickens, a crescendo mounts, and the antagonist lifts the lid to reveal... a single mezzo-piano pitch. To be fair to Benjamin, this muted dramatism is arguably endemic in his generation's operatic writing: while a composer like Birtwistle might write "a riotous blood-orgy", Benjamin and so many of his generation-X contemporaries (Chin, Turnage, Adès, et al) are producing crystalline music dramas that are beautiful, pithy, and clean.[2] This is, of course, a sweeping generalisation, but it's the compositional horizon that I could feel myself sinking into as I took my seat on Thursday. Written on Skin's brilliance loomed large, but my nagging reservations about it loomed larger still.

In light of this climax-avoidance, perhaps the plot of Lessons suits Crimp and Benjamin well. Concerning Edward II's (Stéphan Degout) romance with Piers Gaveston (Gyula Orendt), it explores the devastating consequences of the king's aversion to conflict. Pertinently, almost nothing happens. Events are refracted through the reactions of those around the king: his wife Isabella (Barbara Hannigan), his children (silent daughter and son Samuel Boden), his starving subjects, and his mutinous brother Mortimer (Peter Hoare). Throughout the slow, inevitable decline into civil war, the locus of the drama lies squarely in conversation. Significantly, Crimp has dropped his hallmark technique of self-narration, which dominated both of their previous collaborations, and reserved it for a central meta-play (a highlight, by the way). Some extremely compelling music conducts the royal household's tension through scene changes, implying all of this unseen action, sometimes powerfully.

Katie Mitchell's direction is just wonderful. She's clearly taken on the criticism that Written on Skin had distractingly busy margins; most of the action takes place in one room which rotates, oriented by a shifting fish tank and bed, as tensions mount and different perspectives are centred. The politics of the bedroom are constantly within sight. In a move reminiscent of Keith Warner's Wozzeck, the children are privy to everything, and this, too, is a good decision. The didacticism, mostly latent in the text but heightened in Mitchell's production, comes to a head in an extraordinary exchange between Isabella and the subjects involving a pearl, but this is really the only point at which Hannigan really gets a go, and Isabella's character development is disappointingly scant.

Appropriate to the text as so many frustrated climaxes might be, I can't shake the feeling that what essentially constituted Written on Skin's biggest flaw just can't be redressed as a good thing. Admittedly, I know Written on Skin unhealthily well, but Lessons was so very like it, with its virtually identical timbral palette, harmonic approaches, and almost directly mappable cast (even if the protector is split into two), that I could very often guess which note was going to be sung next. I hope that Benjamin is simply still carving out a style, and not beginning to stagnate.

Opera's a dirty business: all sex and violence, which is why I like it. But Lessons felt sanitised. Words cannot express how happy I am that Benjamin has taken on an explicitly queer text, but while Gaveston's palm-reading scenes were beguiling, and hearing two baritones merging in his sensuous counterpoints gratifyingly Narcissan, I worry that there wasn't much going on beyond stock post-Britten Othering/Orientalism. The text Crimp provided for the king and Gaveston was some of his most arresting, toying with masochism, and employing formal repetition in an immediately seductive guise that I wanted more of, but Benjamin's setting was too reserved. I can go to Into the Little Hill for the cimbalom dance figures of the Stranger, or to Written on Skin for appropriated drum timbres. What I wanted, to be blunt, was less mystique and more honest smut. If the opening line of your opera is, "it's nothing to do with loving another man", you simply cannot afford to be prudish or bland when it comes to queer sexuality or pain, because the mantle has already been taken up. I consequently found myself wholly indifferent to Isabella's affair with Mortimer.

Where Lessons lacks love-making it lacks violence. The ending, essentially a cut to black, leaves the distinct impression that the whole piece is unfinished. It's the same problem, it's the fear of climaxing. We see somebody poised to pull the trigger but we never hear the bang. Ironically, the fallout is that it seems that Crimp and Benjamin have peaked. I don't want that to be true, but the question that remains is, "why?". Is opera already too gratuitous a form for them, such that a gunshot or an orgasm is now vulgar overkill? I can see the rationale. But I don't come to opera for rational reasons, I come to arch my back and shudder for an hour or five. I come for lessons in love and violence, not lessons in self-control.