This Opera is Pure Poetry in Motion
By LUKE GRUNDY
Opera I WENT TO THE HOUSE BUT DID NOT ENTER Royal Lyceum Theatre
What do T S Eliot, Samuel Beckett and one of the finest vocal quartets have in common? They all feature in Heiner Goebbels’ new work, premiering at the festival.
Goebbels, who this year returns to the festival for the third time, is currently the toast of the contemporary music and theatre scene, his work being hailed as “totally magical” and “spellbinding”. Here, he has adapted a trio of classic 20th-century texts: Beckett’s Worstward Ho, Eliot’s “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”, and Maurice Blanchot’s The Madness of the Day, from which the title of the opera is taken.
Little has been revealed about the performance, but one of the few certainties is the involvement of the Hilliard Ensemble, a chamber quartet who have been described as “tremendously articulate, with individual voices dissolving into a nebulous, unified whole”.
Much is expected of this dynamic collaboration, and these performances will be anything but ordinary. The opera contains no defined characters, and promises to be an “exploration of the meaning of ‘I’”. There is no musical accompaniment, so Goebbels will instead rely on the fine voices of countertenor David James, tenors Roger Covey-Crump and Steven Harrold, and baritone Gordon Jones to fill the Royal Lyceum.
Goebbels wanted to use what he describes as “the wonderful capacities the singers have”, continuing: “My main impression was that they have an intensity that comes not from an ego or a conventional idea of presence, but from being a team of four. It’s a polyphonic body of voices.”
The composer also has great hopes for the work as he feels the Edinburgh audience will be a receptive one. “I’m very much against using text for your own musical aesthetics,” he says, “something I see in a lot of my colleagues’ work. The texts disappear or you don’t understand them. Here, the audience will understand.”
28 to 30 August (0131-248 4848)
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