Читать книгу The Collins Guide To Opera And Operetta - Michael White - Страница 58
ОглавлениеFORM: Chamber opera in a Prologue and one act; in English
COMPOSER: Peter Maxwell Davies (1934– )
LIBRETTO: Peter Maxwell Davies
FIRST PERFORMANCE: Edinburgh, 2 September 1980
Principal Characters
The lighthouse keepers/relief officers
Sandy Tenor
Blazes Baritone
Arthur Bass
Synopsis of the Plot
Setting: An Edinburgh courtroom and the Flannan Isle lighthouse; December 1900
PROLOGUE In the courtroom, the three officers who arrived at the lighthouse to relieve the keepers and found it abandoned give their version of events.
ACT I In a flashback to the lighthouse we are introduced to the three lighthouse keepers. It is their last evening and they eat, play cards and sing to amuse themselves. Slowly, however, underlying tensions and mutual enmities begin to surface and their characters become more clearly defined: the Bible-thumping hypocrite, Arthur; the rough, uncultivated Blazes; and the gentler, wistful Sandy. As thick fog slowly blankets the lighthouse, emotional tensions are heightened to breaking point and each man sinks into despair, haunted by his own personal demon. Suddenly the blinding lights of an oncoming ship appear through the fog, to be mistaken for the eyes of a great beast. The three keepers are replaced by the three relief officers who indicate that the keepers, driven to insanity by their isolation, had attacked them and had to be killed. The mystery surrounding the lighthouse (did the keepers abandon it or were they killed?) is never solved; the light is made automatic but the three men can still be seen, forever reliving their final hours.
Music and Background
The courtroom prologue suggests parallels with Britten’s Peter Grimes, and something of the tough, man-against-the-elements atmosphere of that earlier piece transfers to this operatic psycho-drama, although the forces are much smaller and the music more tightly written, using mathematical systems in the way that much of Davies’ work does. The more lyrical moments tend to be parodies of popular musical forms – another Davies fingerprint. All the roles are taken by the same three voices.
Highlights
The arrival of ‘the Beast’ is memorable, and so is the mechanically repeated figure, ‘The lighthouse is now automatic’, that plays out the score.
Did You Know?
The opera is based on a true story of three keepers who disappeared from the Flannan Isle lighthouse in 1900. On the very night the opera premiered in 1980, the Flannan Isle lighthouse (now automatic) mysteriously, and for the first time ever, went out.
Recommended Recording
Neil Mackie, Christopher Keyte, Ian Comboy, BBC Philharmonic/Peter Maxwell Davies. Collins Classics 14152. The only one.
