Ways of hearing

‘What gives your lies such power?’ asks the bewildered Sicilian leader in Szymanowski’s opera Krol Roger. The question is addressed to a charismatic shepherd, on trial for propagating a lascivious new religion of unbridled sensuality. Roger’s wife, Roxana, has already converted along with many of his subjects, while the city’s conservative and clerical factions clamour for the blasphemer’s death. But Roger resolves to see for himself.

Or rather hear for himself. For although the shepherd’s uncanny beauty is clear for all to see, his real power comes from the music, whose snaking contour weaves its eerie magic round the listener and disorientates him, disarming power of judgment by replacing its hard ground with something soft, pleasurable but alarmingly shapeless.

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Plato wouldn’t have stood for it. Musical innovation, he warned, should be prohibited as a danger to the state. So grounded is our moral character in our sense of musical harmony and rhythm that substantial alteration necessitates an entirely new system of government. This, above all, is what is at play in Szymanowski’s opera: the collision of two musical systems, ways of believing and seeing, which yield after a long struggle to a third way in which the Apollonian virtues of order and balance become energised through exposure to the darker, destructive forces of Dionysus.

Krol Roger is in this sense an ideal opera because, as in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, its dramatic content is quite literally heard through the music. And what tremendous music it is, subtly and exotically scored with moments of bewitching beauty and earth-shattering power. It opens, in total darkness, with a simple Byzantine hymn, with primitive harmonisations and a hesitant mantra beaten out on a tam-tam. The style and texture bloom gradually, increasing in polyphonic complexity and force to reveal the awful power of God and the wonder of his human representative, Roger.