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Birtwistle’s brilliance

Michael Tanner

Wednesday, 23rd April 2008

The Minotaur
Royal Opera

For the first time in the 12 years that I have been reviewing opera weekly, I have been to the first performance of a masterpiece. The Minotaur, so far as I can tell from one intense experience, has all of Harrison Birtwistle’s strengths and none of his weaknesses. He likes to take on big themes, and that leads him to mythology, whether domestic, as in the brilliant early Punch and Judy, or cosmic, as in The Mask of Orpheus and Gawain. Though both those operas have great passages, the former is sunk by prolix pretentiousness, the latter is damaged by diffuseness, even in its revised version. By contrast, The Minotaur is compact, lasting for about two and a quarter hours, and without a superfluous moment, gesture or note. And no composer can ever have had such complex thoughts realised so completely in the unveiling of his work. Every aspect of the production and performance shows the utmost confidence and careful preparation, so careful that this superb set of artists can throw caution to the wind.

There is, as with all the major myths, no such thing as a definitive version of the Minotaur story. In a note to the libretto, its author David Harsent states that he considers the bull that came from the sea was Poseidon, so that Asterios the minotaur and Theseus who slays him had the same father, while Ariadne and Asterios had the same mother, Pasiphae. That means that the three chief characters in this opera are all too intimately related, so that the feelings of hatred, revulsion and attraction which connect them are partly incestuous, though the characters are not clear on the subject, and there is a good deal of ‘Some say that...’, the figures in the myth themselves being students of myth when they have any time to spare, as in Thomas Mann. The relationship of Ariadne and Theseus is not a passionate one — passions tend to centre on the Minotaur — but rather one of calculation. He is determined to slay the man–bull, she is desperate to leave Crete and go to Greece; whether we are supposed to ponder the fact that she will be abandoned on Naxos it’s hard to say. The libretto leaves that and other possibilities open to our speculations, in the best mythical tradition, if with a degree of self-consciousness which may be a blemish.

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