Igor Toronyi-Lalic

All at sea | 19 November 2015

Ignore this Royal Opera House world premiere. Save your money. And invest it instead in a lively new work, Biedermann and the Arsonists, at the Lilian Baylis Studio

The Royal Opera House seemed nervous about Georg Friedrich Haas’s world première Morgen und Abend. They sent out a pdf of the libretto in advance, which they only ever do when they think that the words or the plot are unintelligible. Thrilled to report that it was a double whammy.

An introductory soliloquy was spoken by actor Klaus Maria Brandauer. He’s apparently an Austrian national treasure. I’m not sure he’d get a part in Hollyoaks here. He wobbled on to the stage in wellies, paunch, beard and alcoholic’s nose. He was the spit in fact of Ricky Tomlinson in The Royle Family, except he said things like ‘he’ll be alone for ever alone’, instead of ‘my arse’, which coincidentally were very close to my feelings that evening.

At this point I’m traditionally meant to elucidate the plot — which is quite hard when there isn’t a plot. One depressed Norwegian fisherman, Olai, gives birth to another depressed Norwegian fisherman, Johannes. Johannes goes fishing. The end. There is also the appearance of a dead fisherman Peter, a friend. He has long, wavy blond hair. Your head thinks Grimes; your eyes see Stringfellow. Either way Johannes is rightly wary of getting into the boat with him.

A meditation on life and death, some have called it. A pretentious waste of time is, I imagine, how most punters will find it. Not that that’s ever stopped opera. If the lack of a decent story were a barrier to success, the operatic repertoire would be virtually non-existent. Trust the music, we’re meant to think in this sort of emergency. Well, I’m afraid that won’t get you far.

Haas is often lumped in with a group of composers called the Spectralists, so called because they turned to the spectrum of overtones that reside within each note (a bit like how the colour spectrum lurks within each beam of white light) as a starting point for compositional explorations.

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