Music Theatre since 1990 - Schott Music

Synopsis
It was surely an act of faith - if not of folly - for me to choose Rinuccini’s old Arianna libretto,
when I could barely make out the meaning of the words. Yet I knew it was right for me, just
as I would have known that Orfeo or Poppea or, for that matter, La Traviata or Lohengrin (had
they been so unfortunate as to lose their music) would not be right. I also knew and this may
seem almost perverse, that it was to be Arianna and not Ariadne - that is Italian and not English.
Common sense led me to experiment with the possibility of an English version, for it would
certainly have made things a lot easier; but in this case I knew that my attraction had as much
to do with the sound as the meaning of the antique Italian [...] My final score is deliberately
patchy: some parts are highly worked, polyphonically and instrumentally; elsewhere the bare
bones of the original are left to stand. The impression I aim to create is one of transparency:
the listener should perceive, both in the successive and simultaneous dimensions of the score,
the old beneath the new and the new arising from the old. We are to see a mythological and
ancient action, interpreted by a 17th-century poet in a modern theatre. My hope, as expressed
by Rinuccini’s Apollo in the (unset) prologue of Arianna, is that ‘it will come to pass that in
these new songs you will admire the ancient glory of the Grecian stage’. (Alexander Goehr,
Royal Opera House programme, 1995)
Arianna
15.09.1995 Royal Opera House Covent Garden
© Cliver Barder/Arenapal.com
The eight scenes from Rinuccini’s text in Goehr’s musical adaptation give the impression that
Monteverdi has come back to life 356 years after his death and, still familiar with his own idiom,
is attempting to find himself somewhere between the Second Viennese School and Goehr’s
teacher, Olivier Messiaen. Unlike Alfred Schnittke, Goehr does not assemble or alienate quotations
or pseudo-quotations; in fact, he transforms precisely observed stylistic characteristics of Monteverdi
in the light of his experiences with Schoenberg, Webern, Berg and Messiaen into his own
tonal language. Thus his concentrated, quasi pointillist instrumentation is both reminiscent of the
brilliant Spaltklang ensemble of the Early Baroque period and also of Webern’s structural colouring
of Bach’s Ricercare. (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 23.04.1999)
53