George Benjamin: Lessons in Love and Violence, reviewed by Axel Englund

Lessons in Love and Violence

Royal Opera House at Covent Garden

Composer: George Benjamin

Libretto: Martin Crimp

World premiere: May 10, 2018

Production direction: Katie Mitchell

Musical director/conductor: George Benjamin

King: Stéphane Degout

Gaveston/Stranger: Gyula Orendt

Isabel: Barbara Hannigan

Mortimer: Peter Hoare

Boy, later Young King: Samuel Boden

Girl: Ocean Barrington-Cook

Witness 1/Singer 1/Woman 1: Jennifer France

Witness 2/Singer 2/Woman 2: Krisztina Szabó

Witness 3/Madman: Andri Björn Róbertsson

“Let us spend money on poetry and music,” announces the King from the stage of the Royal Opera House, which incidentally boasts an annual expenditure of about £130M, “or would you rather we preferred for our entertainment human blood and the machinery of killing?”¹ The juxtaposition of real violence—whether it is immediate aggression or wrapped in political decisions—and its theatrical representation runs through every scene of Lessons in Love and Violence, the new opera by composer George Benjamin and playwright Martin Crimp, which premiered at Covent Garden on May 10, 2018 in a production directed by Katie Mitchell. Despite its title, the second full-scale opera by this creative team is hardly didactic in its ambitions.² Instead, the scintillating shades of Benjamin’s orchestra—expanded at significant moments by the uncustomary colors of cimbalom and tombak, a drum with its roots in ancient Persia—turn in a slow-motion dance with Crimp’s evocative text, in which every line seems haunted by all others through allusion, permutation, and inversion.

The story takes place in the royal residence. While the libretto specifies a series of locations in the palace for the seven scenes, the set designed by Vicki Mortimer compresses all into a single room. It is a sizable yet claustrophobic space, which alternates between bedroom, theater, and prison, and the distinction is never firm. The regal-blue walls are graced by two paintings, one aquarium, and a cabinet of trophies. On one side of the room a makeshift auditorium is evoked by rows of chairs for the spectators. The stage-on-the-stage that they are facing, on the other side of a fluorescent tube in the floor, is a king-size bed—no privacy for the powerful, whose erotic affairs have always been a public spectacle. Throughout the opera, the relationship of an onstage performance and an onstage audience is explored from ever-changing angles. For each of the seven scenes, the room turns ninety degrees counter-clockwise, thus letting the Royal Opera House audience see it from a new perspective each time the curtain rises. It becomes a visual metaphor for the opera’s orbit around the themes of art, violence, and desire, as well as, I will argue, for the hypnotic circularity that differentiates this opera from the linear momentum of its predecessor, Written on Skin.

In the opening scene quoted above, the King, formidably created by the warm baritone of Stéphane Degout, is arguing with his down-to-earth military advisor Mortimer. In the role of the latter, we hear tenor Peter Hoare questioning the astronomic costs of the court entertainments and reminding the ruler of his responsibility for the starving population. At the opposite end of the spectrum stands the King’s other advisor, Gaveston, for whom the value of art is intrinsic and self-evident. The terms of this argument are all-too-familiar to opera buffs, repeating themselves from Molière’s claim that opera is the most expensive of all the noises known to man, via the political outrage at Ludwig II’s subsidization of the Wagnerian enterprise, all the way to present-day cuts in arts funding.³ In Lessons in Love and Violence, there is no “good” side of this argument, and matters are further complicated by the fact that Gaveston is also the King’s lover in a same-Fach affair between the voices of Degout and fellow baritone Gyula Orendt.⁴ When the self-righteous Mortimer inadvertently lets his disgust at the liaison show, the King dispossesses him, thus choosing aesthetic and erotic pleasure over political reason. Meanwhile, his chain-smoking, gin-slugging queen Isabel, soberly sung by Barbara Hannigan, soon sides with Mortimer in order to depose the King and install his son—initially called “the Boy”—in his place.

The roots of this story reach back into the early fourteenth century to the fate of Edward II, which famously inspired Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy published in 1594.⁵ The historical Edward II was removed from the throne by his wife Isabella of France and Roger de Mortimer. After the murder of the king and his supposed lover Piers Gaveston, Edward III inherited the throne in 1327. Soon after, the new regent banished his mother and had Mortimer executed. In Benjamin and Crimp’s version, the King is a gloomy opera queen of the Koestenbaumian persuasion. His penchant for music theater comes across as a longing for something he cannot have as a monarch—a truly innocent spectacle. The King lauds the entertainment of poetry and music over that of killing and proudly proclaims, “let ours be a regiment of tolerance and love.”⁶ But absolute power turns every performance into reality: when your word is law, your poetry becomes lethal for those who depend on you. At the same time, this merging of spectacle and reality leaves the King numb. He seems to long for an experience that feels real, and enlists Gaveston in a sadomasochistic amalgamation of love and violence to achieve it. The King’s dilemma, then, is both that spectacle refuses to stay spectacle, and that reality does not feel real enough.

Of course, the root of this problem is that monarchy itself is spectacle: a sovereign’s power rests on felicitous performatives in J. L. Austin’s sense.⁷Lessons in Love and Violence thematizes this problem from the start. When the King sees Mortimer questioning his authority, Benjamin’s score stretches Crimp’s words “King—I am king” into a repetition that verges on desperation. Vocally outlining a dominant-seventh chord over C, the King furiously insists on his royal standing: “King—I am king. I am, I am, I am King. King—I am King. I am, I am king.”⁸ Making this claim, he is standing on the “stage” part of the stage, across from the onstage spectators’ chairs—in his underpants, as he dresses. He is soon handed a pair of trousers, the performance is successful, and Mortimer is banished. In the fourth scene, however, when the latter returns to seize power and attacks Gaveston during a musical entertainment, the performance of power fails for the first time. The King’s orders for the arrest of the intruder are ignored. Gaveston is executed, the fish in the aquarium die, and the paintings are taken down from the walls. Soon afterwards, Isabel leaves him for Mortimer: “Play king alone here in the dark. We will leave you the box of toys.”⁹ Felicitous illocution is all that stands between authoritarian command and utter powerlessness. When the performance of power misfires, monarchy becomes nothing but child’s play.

Or worse: lunacy. While the King is imprisoned, a Madman, whose cat Felicity has let him know that he is king, is on trial: “I am king not only by inheritance but by the will of the universe encoded in a bright pattern of stars.”¹⁰ In this, the fifth scene, the stage room has turned 360 degrees, and thus mirrors the layout of the opening scene where Mortimer first questioned the King. The King is supplanted by the Madman, now placed on the bed-as-stage, watched and terrorized by Mortimer as Isabel and the Boy sit on the spectators’ chairs. Before the trial begins, the King himself is led through the room, right next to the bed, as if to emphasize his closeness to the Madman. A servant switches on the fluorescent footlights between the bed and the chairs, perhaps to reveal the performance of power as just that: a mere performance. Then, as the Madman’s claim to the crown misfires, Mortimer strangles him, and does so using the Girl’s jump rope as a noose, underlining again the volatile border between playing and killing. The Boy, exquisitely voiced by high tenor Samuel Boden, tries to persuade Mortimer to be merciful, but as the Madman is killed, he receives his first instruction in the art of ruling.

Lessons in Love and Violence gyrates around this inextricable entanglement of art and death in a subtly obsessive manner. One of the opera’s most poignant passages occurs in the second scene, where Mortimer secretly returns to the court accompanied by a group of witnesses that he has encountered during his banishment. In the presence of the repulsed queen, they testify to their suffering under poverty, starvation, and war. But the focus soon shifts to art: “They say one night of music for that man Gaveston … costs the same as one year of our labour.”¹¹ Isabel, disagreeing with her paramour Mortimer in matters aesthetic, vehemently rejects the idea of putting an exchange value on music, and teaches the lesson by example. Placing herself on the bed stage, she drops a priceless pearl in a cup of vinegar, and while the pearl “would buy each one of you a house with fourteen rooms,” that is not its beauty: “The beauty of the pearl—like the slow radiance of music—is what the pearl is.”¹² This is one of the moments when Hannigan’s precise, slender lyricism is allowed to shine most clearly, floating in silver-spun pianissimo phrases high above a breathless orchestra. Her ambiguously cruel celebration of musical beauty is crowned with some exquisite tone painting on Benjamin’s part, as pizzicato drops and tremolo shivers accompany the dissolution of the pearl.¹³ Offended by the presence of poverty, Isabel cannot resist the temptation to end her lesson with a further demonstration of power, as she casually orders that one of the witnesses down the contents of the cup. According to the score, it is only vinegar. Yet the queen refers to it as an unspecified “acid” and Mitchell stages it as lethal: the nervous handling, the protective gloves, and the panic of the held-down witness make clear that the liquid is highly corrosive. Just like the pearl and what it could buy, human life is expendable to the aestheticist. Its only true value is the ephemeral beauty of its dissolution.

The King, for his part, yearns for his own dissolution. This desire is closely associated with his beloved Gaveston, in two enigmatic episodes where the King’s palm is read. These passages, mirroring each other as premonition and recollection, stand out in sharp relief against the surrounding musical continuum, and both are framed as semi-erotic performances on the stage bed. After a long pause, a quietly syncopated dance of cimbalom and tombak is set in motion, occasionally shaded by harp and bass clarinet, as Gaveston traces the lines of the King’s open palm. In the first episode, the King asks to hear about his future death at Gaveston’s hands (fig. 1). Instead, his past is narrated as the story of a child regent, presaging the failed performance that turns monarchy into childish make-believe. When the frustrated King asks where Gaveston is, the answer—“You know where I am. Inside your life”—points not only to their symbiotic relationship, but also to death’s inherence in life.¹⁴ Gaveston, who becomes the personification of death, is the King’s ultimate love object. For those familiar with the popular legend of Edward II’s death, replayed in Marlowe’s adaptation, the opera’s evocation of this moment is inevitably colored by the idea of a gruesome execution. Through sadistic mimicry of the sodomy of which he was suspected, Edward reputedly had a red-hot poker inserted into his rectum, burning away his bowels without leaving any signs of external violence.¹⁵ This horrific image of homophobic cruelty becomes the absent center that the palm-reading scenes circumnavigate through the King’s repeated enquiry after his death and Gaveston’s evasive answers.

Figure 1

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The King (Stéphane Degout) has his palm read by Gaveston (Gyula Orendt) while the former’s daughter (Ocean Barrington-Cook) watches. (ROH/Stephen Cummiskey 2018).

The second palm-reading episode begins in the King’s imagination. As Mortimer tries to prove to a court that the King is unfit to rule, the latter only repeats, “Drumming—I can hear drumming.”¹⁶ This drumming, however, is palpably absent from the score in this passage: it is an aural delirium, marked only by a series of snapping accents in the harp echoing the timbre of the cimbalom.¹⁷ Instead, the dreamed sound is realized soon afterwards by a variation on the tombak-and-cimbalom music, as the executed Gaveston returns (in the guise of a “Stranger”) to read the palm of the King once more.¹⁸ This time, he answers the King’s question about his future demise—“How will I die?”—by informing him that he has missed it. He is already dead. The effect is as startling as it is beautiful: via the King’s musical hallucinations, the onstage events have seamlessly passed into an afterlife where the shadows of the former lovers meet. The brutal legend of Edward’s murder is echoed only as a memory while the Stranger lies down on the stage bed, gently spooning with his erstwhile regent. The dead King, by contrast, voices a masochistic longing for the violent intensity of living reality that the opera denies him: “Bind me to a metal rack. Burn me. Make me alive.”¹⁹

Gaveston’s storytelling in the palm-reading episodes is akin to his “entertainments” for the King: like the on-stage performances, they are plays-within-the-play that seem to leak out into the diegesis, muddying the border between representation and reality. Mitchell’s staging lets the visual arts play a similar role. The King, unsurprisingly perhaps, is an admirer of Francis Bacon. The two paintings that adorn his rooms are “Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror” (1968), which depicts Bacon’s dipso burglar lover of that name, while the subject of the other, “Reclining Man with Sculpture” (1960–61), is more mysterious. It is an image of a man looking at art. A sculpted man’s head is placed on a table, so fleshy and messy that one wonders whether it is not an actual body part rather than a sculpture. The face of the man looking at it is smudged as if wounded (or painted) and he is wearing a white shirt soaked in blood. From there a crimson field spreads across the lower part of the picture. It is impossible to tell whether it is part of the sofa’s upholstery or a pool of blood in which the man and the sculpture are wading together.²⁰ The painting might have come across as a mere decorative detail had it not been echoed in the crucial scene where the Boy—now the Young King—proves that he has learned Mortimer’s lesson on ruling a state. The latter is sat down on the stage bed with his face smudged in dirt and blood: he is wearing a white shirt soaked in blood, looking just like Bacon’s painting. In a moment of violent irony, the utilitarian character who rid the walls of the disturbing art must play the lead role in the re-enactment of the art he tried to supress.

The comparison with Written on Skin, which was more or less unanimously greeted as a masterpiece when it premiered in 2012, is perhaps inevitable.²¹ The press reviews of Lessons in Love and Violence ranged from ecstatic praise to the odd hatchet job, but the dominant reaction appears, even in the positive ones, to have been a combination of awe at the skill of everyone involved and a strange feeling of lukewarm indifference incited by the memory of the earlier opera’s immediate emotional impact. As Rupert Christiansen put it in the Telegraph, “I left Covent Garden impressed rather than excited or moved. For all the refinements, Benjamin and Crimp haven’t moved on from Written on Skin so much as shuffled the cards to play the same game.”²² The similarities between the two works are indeed palpable enough to cast Lessons in Love and Violence as a direct sequel: Crimp’s concentrated poetry and its unsettling amalgamation of brutality and desire; the ever-changing luminescence of Benjamin’s orchestra as it plays out gorgeous lyrical sweeps against swiftly jagging ostinati; the medieval story “staged” on stage from a contemporary vantage point by Mitchell and Mortimer (the designer, that is, not her namesake character); and, perhaps most distinctively, the sum of these parts forming a virtuosic superimposition of opera as immersive magic and as distanced self-reflection. The crucial difference, which is implicit in almost all of the reviews and which I have attempted to bring into focus here, is that between the circular and the linear. Written on Skin, in spite of its focus on retelling of past events, had a relentlessly directional force in text and music alike, propelling the drama forward toward a seemingly inevitable end. By contrast, the motion of Lessons in Love and Violence appears to revolve continuously and prismatically. It never lapses into the repetitive, but the striking immediacy of the drama in the preceding opera has been replaced by a mesmerizing, slow-motion swivelling. If the previous opera gave the impression that it could only end exactly the way it did, the present one seems at every moment equally close to its conclusion in the death and silence around which it circles.

Or, differently put: on the turning stage, each end is also a new beginning. Mortimer’s death, the short seventh scene, is introduced as the opera’s final play-within-a- play, an entertainment with which the Young King presents his mother. He informs her that he has forbidden music. In its scene-by-scene rotation, the stage room is just about to come full circle a second time, letting the actual audience replace the onstage one as spectators of the execution. The opera’s final lines announce the commencement of that show, as the Girl—the old King’s daughter—points a gun at Mortimer: “With a scene then of a human being / broken and broken / by the rational application / of human justice / our entertainment begins.” (fig. 2) ²³ Silence as the curtain falls. When the lights are out, the unsettling darkness that permeates the opera’s kaleidoscopically shifting constellations still lingers in the auditorium: sound and silence, love and hate, power and powerlessness shift and revolve with the onstage world, but the lynchpin on which it all turns is a constant violence. Hence, the circular movement does not end with the final curtain. Instead, the conclusion of the opera announces the start of the musicless and (supposedly) rational entertainment of the world outside the opera house, in which the vicious spiral of violence will doubtless continue indefinitely: “On no side of this curtain,” as the Young King tells his mother, “are we innocent.”²⁴

Figure 2

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Girl (Ocean Barrington-Cook) about to execute Mortimer (Peter Hoare) in the final scene. (ROH/Stephen Cummiskey 2018).

Footnotes