Fragments of families

“Can we try to be civil? Just for one night”, pleads Christian, minutes after arriving at his father’s swanky hotel, moments before the other guests arrive to celebrate the latter’s sixtieth birthday party. It doesn’t look promising. Christian’s younger brother, Michael, left off the guest list after causing a drunken ruckus the year before, has in the duration of roughly one minute argued with the hotel receptionist, picked a fight with his wife and got into a shouting match with his sister Helena for not bothering to come to their sister Linda’s funeral. At least the terms of engagement – “Dickhead”, “Witch”, “Asshole”, “Bitch” – follow a rhyming scheme, and, as the guests arrive to a chorus of “Hello, hello, it’s a glorious day”, the litany of insult is soon submerged under the repetitive veneer of boisterous civility.

One hardly needs consult Gibbon or indeed Freud these days to know that when appeal is made to the virtues of civilization, it won’t be long before its discontents come crashing onto the scene. And indeed, as anyone will know who has seen Thomas Vinterberg’s acclaimed film Festen (1998; distributed in English as The Celebration), on which Mark-Anthony Turnage and Lee Hall’s new opera is closely based, being civil isn’t really on Christian’s mind either. He just wants his siblings to behave themselves long enough for everyone to make it through to dinner, to the point at which, as the eldest son, he will be called on to give a toast in honour of his father, Helge. “When Daddy had a bath” is the title of the speech Christian has prepared, which, as the company’s expectant laughter confirms, sounds just right for the job of bringing the highly respected paterfamilias down a rung or two.

Or perhaps the whole ladder. The film’s central device is that civilization is now so rotten, its contradictions so deeply entrenched, that the usual regulatory mechanisms will no longer work: truth has become a work of violence. Christian’s ironical anecdote, in which he reveals that he and his twin sister were raped repeatedly as children by his father, leading to his sister’s eventual suicide, is initially greeted with embarrassed chuckles as a tasteless joke. It is only when the action assumes a fully Bacchanalian flavour that the message is able to make its way into the open. This is mirrored in the film by its revolutionary cinematography, laid out in Vinterberg and Lars von Trier’s “Dogme” manifesto (Festen was the first Dogme film). Their remedy for the perceived failure of the nouvelle vague to provide a genuine alternative to bourgeois cinema was promised in the resolve to adopt a series of strict stipulations about the exclusive use of natural lighting and sound, handheld cameras and jump-cut editing that mimics the eye’s natural response to any scene spiralling out of control. Thus, when the candlelit banquet descends into darkness – the cameras and microphones struggling to focus on, track and, at times, simply get out of the way of the increasingly haphazard action – we know the murky business at the film’s heart is properly under way.

A central article of Dogme faith is that “music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot”. This gives a good idea of the scale of the challenge facing Turnage and Hall in their attempt to adapt for the operatic stage not only the film, but also something of its radical spirit. Turnage, of course, has the advantage of substantial experience as an opera composer (his last Covent Garden opera, Anna Nicole, premiered in 2011)and comes equipped with something of the same 1990s bad-boy reputation as Vinterberg and von Trier, revered for his successful efforts to shake up classical music’s rather stilted image with cheeky injections of jazz and rock, and an abrasive collage-style technique that used rhythm as its primary organizational principle. Even now, when styles in art music often possess no more normative force than simple personality traits, his music still derives an undeniable aesthetic vigour from, as it were, drawing out the big band from the orchestra. But I did wonder, as the guests arrived early in the opera’s first scene with their gaudy chorus of greetings, whether Turnage’s swinging arsenal of brass jabs and string stabs would generate sufficient energy to carry the drama.

I needn’t have worried. His practised feeling for dramatic timing shadows brilliantly the frequent sudden shifts of focus and pacing, and his keen ear, not just for rhythm and gesture, but also for melodic language, captures perfectly the anxieties and suppressed anger of the three children. Christian and Helena’s plaintive longings for a life that could only be lived out of the wreckage of their father’s finds expression in the compressed shards of lyricism that seem to emanate centrifugally from the drama’s dark centre. And it is in this respect that Turnage’s collage technique really comes into its own, as the atomized musical material of postmodernity feeds powerfully on a dramatic scenario in which all passion and feeling seem to have been dismembered. The musical trajectory, in which the characters perceptibly reassemble themselves from fragments, finding that their voices start to make musical sense only when the truth about the twins’ childhood emerges fully into the light, echoes the dramatic arc in which Helge’s world is violently transformed, then left standing in its smoking embers, hollowed out by the violence of confronting its own internal contradictions. A final chorus of “Good morning”, delivered as the guests and family prepare for their departure, superficially recapitulates the atmosphere of their arrival the previous afternoon, but as Christian, bloodied and hungover, blinks uncomprehendingly around himself with an almost Oedipal combination of blindness and insight, he senses at last that his work has been done, the former allure of his father’s world no longer a part of him.

Edward Gardner’s musical direction is wonderfully equal to the job of realizing Turnage’s score, the house chorus and orchestra – and particularly the brass – clearly revelling in the music’s pulsating contours. The role of Christian is beautifully created by Allan Clayton, whose mixture of vocal confidence and bashful physical movement captures well the character’s confrontation with himself. Stéphane Degout is well abreast of Michael, while Natalya Romaniw’s Helena, in the most openly lyrical and emotional of the main solo roles, is superb. As Helge, Gerald Finley balances the character’s trajectory from customary pomposity to outrage and eventually despair, the notes of panic rising, at first barely perceptible, as he squares up to the coming tidal wave. In this he is ably supported by Rosie Aldridge, as his wife, Else, and by Susan Bickley as his mother, who sings a lonely patriotic folk song when called on by the oleaginous toastmaster (Thomas Oliemans) to keep the guests entertained. Helge’s father, bursting at the seams to deliver his bawdy (and admittedly rather funny) speech, which, in his dementia, he does several times in fits and spurts, punctuated as much by poisonous outbursts from the family members to each other as by his own forgetfulness, is brilliantly taken by John Tomlinson. His voice, in a piece of inspired casting, resonates with the ghost of Wotan’s past, as if to suggest that Helge’s abuse is the latest instance in a cycle reaching far back into the hidden annals of the family dynasty.

The staging, directed by Richard Jones to designs by Miriam Buether (set), Nicky Gillibrand (costumes) and Lucy Carter (lighting), is similarly brilliant, alternating between wide-angle scenes of the hotel lobby and teak-panelled ballroom (the veneer is quite literally ruptured when Christian, temporarily imprisoned by Michael, crashes through the panels from the adjoining wine store), and split-scene views of the various bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchen, which allow the direction to follow the score’s jump-cut shifts.

The inevitable risk that attends the now prevalent practice of adapting films for the operatic stage is that the stage version will struggle to supplant the visual memory of the original. In this case, while the film’s low-tech character and insistence on Aristotelian unities of time and place make it in some ways a sensible choice, the fact that Festenrepresents a significant piece of cinematographic history raised concerns that this opera might be measured simply in terms of its success as an adaptation (concerns that were hardly appeased by the Royal Opera’s promotional materials, which seemed more enthusiastic about the film than the opera, with the composer’s name barely visible on the website and posters). In the event, thanks in part to the easy naturalism of Hall’s libretto and to the inventive virtuosity and unified visual aesthetic of Jones’s staging, but primarily to Mark-Anthony Turnage’s perfectly turned score, this sense was erased by the end (which departs slightly from that of the film). Instead the feeling was one of opera doing what opera does best: singing a world into being, laying bare its elements and the uncontainable forces driving them towards each other, then blowing the whole thing to smithereens.

Guy Dammann teaches philosophy and music at Uppsala University

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