BENJAMIN: Picture a Day Like This / Marianne Crebassa, mezzo (Woman); Beate Mordal, sop (Lover/Composer); Cameron Shahbazi, cnt-ten (Lover 2/Composer’s Assistant); John Brancy, bar (Artisan/Collector); Anna Prohaska, sop (Zabelle); Mahler Chamber Orch.; George Benjamin, cond / Nimbus NI 8116 (Live: Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, July 5, 2023)
George Benjamin (b. 1960), the son of a publisher and an antique dealer who were not at all involved in classical music, gave up the Beatles and Petula Clark the day he went to see Walt Disney’s then-27-year-old animated film Fantasia in 1967. Unlike myself, who still enjoyed and listened to the best in popular music and jazz after discovering classical, Benjamin threw his pop records in the trash—or dustbin, as the British say. Nine years later, having already learned to play the piano, his teacher Peter Gellhorn took him to meet Olivier Messiaen. Benjamin played an original piece for the great composer—“far too fast the first time,” at a saner tempo the second—and was accepted as Messiaen’s pupil. In a 2023 interview with Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian, Benjamin said that the biggest lesson he learned from Messiaen was “that you must absolutely hear whatever you write. Every note, every rhythm, every dynamic, every timbre, every expression, every slur: you must imagine it all to perfection in your inner ear. That is the job of a composer.”[1]
Fast-forward to the present day, and Benjamin has a solid reputation as an opera composer—but principally in his home country, where the British still try to make learning about and appreciating classical music a part of the school curriculum whereas American schools are far more focused on social justice issues. Not that these are not part of American life, only that education should be something that goes beyond contemporary problems. American schools abandoned music education in 1972, and it shows. We have a huge and diverse population who only knows of more complex forms of music if they investigate it themselves, which is unlikely, or are taught by friends or family members who like it.
Benjamin despaired of meeting the right collaborator to write libretti for him until a friend introduced him to Martin Crimp in the foyer of London’s Royal Festival Hall. It changed his life. Music just pours from him when reading over one of Crimp’s texts, and Picture a Day Like This is no exception. The opera which preceded this, Written on Skin (2012), was set in the 13th century when books had to be hand-written on parchment. A wealthy landowner hires a talented teenaged boy to create and illustrate a book on his family heritage, but during this process he and the landowner’s wife Agnès are attracted to each other. Upon discovering this, the landowner (ironically called “The Protector”) murders the boy and demands that Agnès eat his heart. Agnès commits suicide as Angels make commentary throughout the opera comparing this situation to modern-day social norms. It’s an interesting work and certainly has its share of drama, but to my ears Picture a Day Like This is far deeper, more meaningful and, in its allegorical way, even more dramatic.
Conceived during the post-lockdown period of the Covid-19 pandemic in the early 2020s, Benjamin and Crimp created a work that is both touching and has universal appeal. A mother loses her infant child in death; a mysterious Page tells her that if she can find at least one completely happy person within the next 24 hours and cut a button from their sleeve, her child will be restored to life. Over the course of the next several scenes, the woman encounters people who certainly seem to be happy—a pair of lovers, an artisan, a composer, and a collector—but though none are happy of themselves, the last of these opens the door to a garden where she meets a truly happy person, Zabelle. Zabelle is not only happy but appears to be very much like the woman herself, but when she asks for a button from her chemise to revive her child, Zabelle explains that her happiness only exists because she is not real. Zabelle fades away into nothingness although, in the end, the woman has what she wanted: a button from Zabelle’s chemise.
But reading through the libretto, one realizes there is more to the story than this. The woman is so completely fixated on her dead child—and we’re never told if it was a girl or a boy, it was just “the child”—that she cannot conceive of any other life. The next-to-last person she meets, The Collector, offers her a chance to simply live with him because, like her, he is lonely and has no one else in his life. He does not intend to touch her sexually; he does not want or offer love; he just wants a companion he can talk to, and who can talk to him. Yet the woman keeps asking, over and over, “How can I love you?” To quote the title of an old pop song, “What’s love got to do with it?” The woman is completely fixated on restoring her child because it is more than a child to her. It is her center of existence, her one and only reason for living.
Benjamin does not break rank with other British opera composers in that he includes solo roles for countertenors in all of his operas; as I mentioned in my book, Opera as Drama II, nearly all post-Death in Venice British operas have roles for a countertenor. British classical music is a countertenor culture. He does, however, break rank not only with Britten’s strophic lines for the singers which follow the speech patterns of the words, but also with the modern-edgy style of Thomas Adès and his successors. The sung lines in his music do indeed follow the rhythmic pattern of the words, but they all have a melodic contour. Sometimes this contour is indeed edgy, but only in moments that call for that style; he is not edgy just for the sake of it. In fact, many of the vocal lines in his operas—and Picture a Day Like This is no exception—could almost be heard as descendants of Puccini or Strauss at his most lyrical. The difference is the orchestral accompaniment. This is quite complex, using a variety of harmonic devices from block chords to rootless ones, changed and extended chords, tone clusters and even moments of atonality, but his diversity of approach keeps the listener on his or her toes because, to paraphrase a catchphrase from the advertising world, it is always “subject to change.” In this respect, I believe he is the most interesting and musically creative of all currently living opera composers I’ve heard.
In Picture a Day Like This, Benjamin uses a thinner, sparser orchestral palette to accompany this more intimate drama, and although his use of harmony is similarly diverse in style to Written on Skin, the sung lines are at times more melodic; yet when he does introduce more astringent orchestral sounds, leaning heavily on winds and brass, they have a more pungent quality because there are less strings to blunt their impact. Since this recording of the opera will probably be the only one we will get—even if the opera is performed elsewhere, the modern age of recordings necessitates that someone must pay for the whole project other than the record company—we will discuss the effectiveness of the music for the various roles through their realization in sound by these specific singers. Mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa, as the woman, has a full, rich, expressive voice; her inflections help convey the Woman’s tragic loss and her continual sadness. When she encounters the Lovers, a soprano and a countertenor, the music does not become warm and lovely but harder and edgier. When she asks for a button, they offer her a chance to become part of a ménage a trois. It is what they want to make them happy. But when Lover 2 (the man) admits to Lover 1 that he has slept with other women, a fight breaks out, even though he claims to have told her this before. She leaves while he puts the make on the Woman. At this point, Benjamin uses long-held notes by the winds (particularly the oboe) against uncomfortable but not entirely edgy harmonies to indicate the conflicts of emotion. Both soprano Beate Mordahl (Lover 2, later the Composer) and countertenor Cameron Shahbazi (Lover 1, later the Composer’s Assistant) have firm yet expressive voices. Next, the Woman encounters the Artisan, excellently sung by baritone John Brancy (later the Collector); his music is edgier and more serrated. It’s clear that Benjamin manages to find specifically different music for each of his principal characters, and one of the odd features of Brancy’s music is that it often goes up into the falsetto range, much like the Elderly Fop in Britten’s Death in Venice. Here, we hear deep winds and a bowed string bass mixing with the trumpets, flutes and clarinets as he ratchets up the music when the Woman learns that the Artisan was sucked from a button factory: “they replaced me with a machine. They took my sanity. They took my home.”
Each scene is flawlessly blended from the one preceding and into the one following, yet the musical character of each scene is different. In this era of vocal decline among opera singers, Benjamin was also wise to “double” roles in this short modern parable. That way, he could control who sang in it, and their firm timbres, generally clear diction and very expressive interpretations work hand-in-glove with the chamber orchestra to produce a seamless, unified whole. Like some previous operas I mentioned in my book, Opera as Drama II, it is almost a symphony with voices, but one which continually morphs and changes in both form and texture. Benjamin’s ear for musical color is also evident throughout; the slurring, whining oboe behind the Composer’s lines create an eerie effect not matched elsewhere in the opera.
The end result is music that is, perhaps, just beyond the grasp of the average operagoer, but not forbidding as in the case of such musically congested operas as Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten or Riemann’s Lear. Rather, it lies somewhere between that style and the more lyrical-yet-modern music of Montemezzi or Pizzetti. And although the musical lines themselves are dramatic, and thus could be effectively sung by artists less intense than this original cast, having performers on this high a level ensures its dramatic impact. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that Picture a Day Like This is more taut in structure, edgier in orchestration and thus more dramatic than Written on Skin, good as that opera was. It also doesn’t hurt that the composer himself conducted this world premiere performance at Aix-en-Provence on July 5, 2023. It is thus a good thing to end on a very positive note: for the dramatic conception of the libretto, the drama in the music, and the all-around excellence of the singing and conducting. This is as close as you will get nowadays to a flawless performance of any opera, let alone a new one you’ve not heard before.
—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley
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[1] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/sep/13/george-benjamin-picture-a-day-like-this-crimp-messiaen-disney