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Opera's
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My first opera was Labyrinth, a sort of opera. |
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Labyrinth was made and prepared by a team consisting of a compoiser, a writer, a painter, a director, a choreographer and a filmmaker. |
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It caused a lot of clamour in an already uproarious city. In that turbulent year Labyrinth was filmed for a TV documentary by Henk de By about my work: 'Signalement'. |
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Separate parts of the score have been performed as From the four-track tapes of Labyrinth I extracted my only electronic work: a manipulation of the human voice, called The Aleph (after Borges). |
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Labyrint [Labyrinth], op. 15 (1964) Dansen uit het Labyrint |
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RECONSTRUCTION
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Artistically it was a complete eclecticistic hoax, a big ideological
and musical mess, blocking a natural compositional development in Holland
for a long time. (In fact till a next generation of young composers had
repeated the experience in the nineties with the same disastrous musical
result - because a pencil can only be used by one hand.) In the mean time I was (as always in good old bolsjevist tradition) openly
(and secretly: behind the screens) declared to be But whether it be serialism, minimalism or improvisationalism, the blasphemous
foam of the Guevara-statue in Reconstruction became for me the symbol
of the stagnation of the sixtees (rather than its revolution), and I feel
partly responsible for that. The 'morality' certainly was the greatest
mistake in my personal and musical orbit - for which, naturally, I had
to pay a price. Reconstructie (1969) |
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HOUDINI
My next three operas - Houdini, Monkey, and Symposion - proved to be more viable undertakings. |
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After watching, in the early seventies, a BBC documentary
about Harry Houdini, the great magician and escape artist, I asked the British
poet Adrian Mitchell (whose TO YOU and To WHOM I already had set to music)
to write an opera libretto for me. Not only the dramatic quality of Houdini's life, but also the Orphic theme that ran through it (the hero looking for his love beyond death) attracted me. (See also the essay Orfeo Mundi from Het componeren van de hemel). |
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Houdini, a circus-opera, got its first production in the Holland Festival 1977 with the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Hans Vonk. It was revived two years later, and also produced by the Aspen Festival in the United States, under Richard Dufallo. The public and critical response was overwhelming. |
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The theme of Houdini - man liberating himself from
self-imposed confinement - will always be actual as long as there will
be humans. Writing it freed me from the emotional fetters of the post-war
grief-generation I belong to. Four parts of this opera: |
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A television registration of the second production in the Amsterdam Carré Theatre has been made for the national Theatre Institue by Floris Guntenaar, who also designed the stage for Houdini, Aap and Symposion
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Houdini, op. 25 (1976) |
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May '75, a song of liberation, op. 25a (1975), |
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AAP
In contrast to the large forces needed for HOUDINI (symphony-orchestra, steel drums, mixed choir, seven soloists, dancers and acrobats), my next opera AAP only required twelve musicians, five soloists and a group of martial artists. It was premièred in the 1980 Holland Festival and retaken in 1998.
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AAP was the result of a birthday present to me by my life-long friend and collaborator Floris Guntenaar. The booklet (Marten Toonder's favourite cartoon) contained one of the many Monkey-stories from the seventeenth century that are still very popular in China and elsewhere. It was published again in Peking in 1964, during the otherwise devastating Cultural Revolution of Mao, and soon found its way to the West. | |
I was immediately captured by the fascinating plot of this story: the dramatic explosion of an illusion in a brilliantly designed form. For me it was, besides much more, an expression of my political view on the anti-missile demonstrations in those days (the 'Hollanditis'). I identified with Monkey in his relentless fight against the Grand Illusion, i.e. the one-party utopia that held the countries of the East in a lethal grip |
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AAP will be presented here (in due time) as the
first cartoon-opera on internet. The work consists of two acts, each lasting about half an hour. You can now hear the climax of the second act from the cd of the Reisopera. Aap verslaat de knekelgeest |
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SYMPOSION My last opera until now is also the longest: Symposion, with a duration of three and a half hours. |
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The drama is based on two stories, one dealing with Plato's Symposion (the famous banquet of Socrates and his friends, discussing love), and the other with Tchaikovsky's final days. | |
The story of Tchaikovsky's extorted suicide (for reasons
of his homosexuality) was brought to the West in the early eighties by
the well-known Russian musicologist Alexandra Orlova. On these two pillars the poet Gerrit Komrij wrote a rich and many-faceted libretto for me. The work had its première in 1994, again under Hans
Vonk ('my Mengelberg', as I use to call him). |
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SYMPOSION [Symposium], DE TREIN [The Train], op. 33a (1989) |
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