The Narrator-Protagonist-Soloist
One of my earliest creative concerns was to develop the role of the Jeweller in musical terms. At once the protagonist and the narrator of the poem, his poetic lines shift freely between different registers, ranging from inward-facing, mournful lyricism (‘my wretched desire writhed in despair’), literal recounting of events (‘I witnessed a crystal cliff’), reported speech, and more metaphorical depictions (‘that pearl had rolled away from a mound, where brightly lit stars cast bold shadows’), all of which I wished to set convincingly, in a manner sympathetic to the act of storytelling.
In a previous narrative collaboration with Armitage, Hansel and Gretel: A Nightmare in Eight Scenes (2018), I had opted to use speech rather than song for much of the work, primarily for the sake of intelligibility. This was a continued concern here; for the story to be understood, the text had to be discernible. (This was noted often in my creative diary, for example on 20 June 2019: ‘Looking at how to get text across best […] needs a more speech-rhythmic approach I think’.) I had, and still have, many reservations concerning the setting of text in much (particularly late nineteenth-century, but also more recent) opera, where the musical expressivity of elaborate, ornate, and sometimes angular vocal lines can be prioritized over textual clarity.
My solution here was ultimately multifaceted. First, in order to preserve (or even amplify) the changing poetic registers adopted by the Jeweller, I elected to employ different modes of musical text-setting in response the evolving emotional contour and tone of his narration. Perhaps because of my decision to link the poem’s medieval setting with references to earlier musical styles, this took the form of a predominantly syllabic vocal setting throughout (often deliberately evoking medieval plainsong and neo-baroque recitative), especially for sections of recounted narrative. Only very occasionally did I employ a more expressive aria or arioso style, with a small number of melismas to highlight certain words and emotional gestures, alongside a few moments of word-painting. This somewhat traditionalist approach was something I intended to mirror the expressive contour of the poetry in support of the storytelling.
Second, I spent much energy and time pre-planning the harmonic language for the work, such that the chord-spacings (and ultimately orchestration) would allow the baritone voice to be heard clearly. The difficulty of writing for baritone specifically had been highlighted to me many times, as a student, by Prof. Julian Anderson; the legacy of post-spectral and modernist approaches to harmony often results in spacings that make rich use of the lower-middle register (a lyric baritone’s main range; the problem is also often discussed in relation to the cello, especially when accompanied by an orchestra). The brief passage below offers a particularly pronounced example of this technique; here, the use of the upper register to convey the radiant shimmering described in the poem (discussed below in topical terms) leaves a large ‘gap’ between the baritone voice and the bass note supporting it.1
