Addicted to myth

The revival of Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Minotaur is the most significant artistic event at the Royal Opera since its première, almost five years ago. Unlike Thomas Adès’s more immediately accessible The Tempest, The Minotaur has not gone on to have an international career, though it unquestionably deserves one. With its ideal cast and direction, this production should tour the world’s major opera houses, demonstrating that at irregular but not too large intervals a new masterwork can still be forthcoming in this form, whose decline and decease has often been announced. Birtwistle’s work has something in common with Michael Tippett’s, in that both are attracted or addicted to myth, and therefore unafraid of creating works of immense pretensions, which sometimes come off and sometimes don’t. Tippett was his own librettist, a largely bad idea since there was no check on his intellectual ambitions, while Birtwistle has various librettists, whose work can lead to indigestible concoctions, as The Mask of Orpheus showed, or to great works of the order of Gawain and now this. He and David Harsent worked, naturally, very closely on this text, as they did on Gawain, and the result is mainly a success. The opera is fairly tightly constructed, the action is clear and the words as audible as one could hope with a vast, volcanic orchestra erupting unnervingly and quite often. The whole effect is volcanic, with long periods of sinister quiescence giving way to huge ejaculations and streams of musico-dramatic lava.

At the same time, this is self-conscious mythology. The main characters are meditative and interested in their place in a fore-ordained saga. They aren’t sure of their pedigree, but they are sure that who their parents were has a lot to do with what happens to them. I’m never very happy with Destiny: if something is your destiny, then just go ahead with whatever you want to do and you will clearly fulfil it.