Operas on classical themes were back to back in London and Brighton. The British premiere by English National Opera of Detlev Glanert’s Caligula (2006) was followed by a rare revival of Michael Tippett’s King Priam (1962), a concert performance by the Britten Sinfonia at the Brighton Dome. The most obvious difference was the explicitness of violence depicted, the Trojan war seeming far less horrific than the reign of the crazily despotic Roman emperor. Caligula, as Robert (“Cal”) Lowell put it, “wished the Romans had a single neck”. That impression, with others from Suetonius, stimulated Camus to write his eponymous play in 1938: a prescient evocation of what happens when a psychopath such as Hitler gains absolute power.
Glanert (b1960), a pupil of Henze, whose undoctrinaire modernism has patently been an influence, whose prolific operatic career he is rivalling and whom he physically resembles, went to a Henze librettist, Hans-Ulrich Treichel, for an adaptation of the Camus. It is in Amanda Holden’s stylish English that ENO presents it at the Coliseum, with the usual surtitles; though that master of diction, the baritone Peter Coleman-Wright, has no need of these in the title role. He bestrides the stage, as he must in what is essentially a monodrama, a picture of a desperately disturbed mind.
Attuned to expressionistic tradition, this opera hankers for, and arguably finds, a place on the far side of Strauss’s Salome, Berg’s Wozzeck, Schoenberg’s Erwartung and his melodrama Pierrot Lunaire, with its moonstruck protagonist. Caligula, too, his mind full of murder, is in love with the moon, and the opera grotesquely reinterprets the cliché of “asking for the moon”. Ever since his sister and lover, Drusilla, died, leaving him in a dangerous existential blankness, he literally does this; and when he can’t have it, heads roll.
The Australian director Benedict Andrews puts the bold and visceral at one with careful moral thought, and though the single set he opts for — Ralph Myers’s vertiginous slice of stadium seating — is splashy, it deftly combines references to us, the reflected audience, as potential victims of tyranny; to the use of a stadium as a prison camp by Pinochet; and, punningly, to the “state” itself, and a state of mind, Caligula’s diseased one.
It is not a comfortable experience, becoming inward with a monstrous mind, seeing the body bags proliferate, and one may wish there was more in the way of sheerly compelling music to reward the immersion. Yet the delineation of the ways of a dictator is shrewd: this deluded maniac could well be Gadaffi or Saddam. And there are moments of lyric vision — notably the trio for Scipio (Carolyn Dobbin), Caligula and his wife, Caesonia, a role beautifully sung by Yvonne Howard. The conductor, Ryan Wigglesworth, was admirably able to articulate the Henze-like richness of inner counterpoint while maximising then opera’s lurid impact.
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If Caligula turns its classical subject matter into an “existential” opera, King Priam, premiered 50 years ago in Coventry, uses Brechtian techniques to become an “ethical” one. Its emphatic concern is with the “mystery of human choice”. It has an analytical, forensic quality that is happily, even miraculously, fused with the composer’s aptitude for musical ecstasy. Unlike Glanert’s and most modern operas, Tippett’s sings out its musical justification in every bar.
Hearing it in concert with such a sympathetic conductor as Sian Edwards, one could focus as much on the orchestra as on the singers. I realised how, though the individual inventions seem wilfully diverse, they fit with each other and the vocal structures in a pattern of symmetry and contrast as sinuous and smooth as the sculpture of Tippett’s near-contemporary Barbara Hepworth. The playing was superb and the singing strength impressive: Brindley Sherratt’s Priam doughty and world-weary, Jane Irwin’s Andromache deeply felt, Alan Oke’s Achilles perfectly high-strung. The best moment was perhaps the tenor Benjamin Hulett, as Hermes, hymning “divine music” itself, to a magical accompaniment of piano and harp.