Opera has always had a strange love affair with Violence. It is hard to think of a single opera that doesn’t represent psychological, political or sexual violence on some level. It’s often the extremes of emotion or situation that leads to violent acts, and opera thrives on extremes.
But how far can opera move from merely representing violence (often beautifully, even as something to be desired!) to actively exploring it, wrestling with it as an issue and a theme? Are words and gestures at the mercy of music that can soften or deflect stronger messages? Or is it the opposite; that music reveals the darker undercurrents and psychologies that may drive extreme acts?
Our collaborative project won’t be limited to Opera, and running through it will be an examination of the broader relationship between Music and Violence. We all know that in film for example, music can tell us that something wicked this way comes, without the image changing at all, and can even represent the violent act itself (as in the famous ‘shower scene’ in Psycho), while the Horror genre and the ghost story have made much of the disconcerting effect that an innocent children’s song can conjure up.
Over the course of the collaboration we will look at ten of the most crucial opera scenes that have Violence running through them; from the very birth of opera as an art form right through to contemporary opera and 21st Century music theatre. Each scene will be discussed, rehearsed and performed, always with a view to how it speaks, or resists speaking, about the violence at its heart. Musicologists and theatre directors, singers and scenographers, will come together to examine the language of opera, which includes audience expectations and responses. Operas under our spotlight will include Tchaikovsky’s ‘Eugene Onegin’, Janacek’s ‘Jenufa’, along with the musical ‘Carousel’.