As staged by Stephen Langridge at Snape Maltings, the 95-minute single span makes a stimulating evening. Like most Birtwistle theatre pieces, it has a powerful, graphic impact, however complex it may otherwise be. Yet its true nature is, I think, formalistic rather than dramatic. It is an abstract piece of music that mysteriously coincides with a theatrical presentation, and is affecting less for its emotional content than as an expression of pure delight in form.
The unusual scoring is for string quartet and basset clarinet. In 1980, Birtwistle wrote an adventurous clarinet quintet, and he seems to be revisiting it here, greatly extending its duration and scope, bringing to bear his experience with such elaborate recent essays as Pulse Shadows. The use of interlocking formal cycles (for a string quartet and a chamber ensemble with soprano) brings that work close to drama. The Io Passion goes the extra distance, crossing a boundary separating musical from dramatic thought. Britten did something like this in his chamber opera The Turn of the Screw, conceived instrumentally as variations on a 12-tone theme.
The difference is that we care immensely about the theatrical content of The Turn of the Screw and are only partially aware of the formal experiment, whereas Birtwistle’s schematism drives out other considerations. He has always looked for dramatic subjects that let him indulge his passion for repetition — the cycle of murders in Punch and Judy, of seasons in Gawain, the sheep-counting in Yan Tan Tethera. But here, it is as though cycles came first and a story had to be found for them. There is nothing in the (Ovidian) myth of Io and her rape by Zeus and metamorphosis into a heifer that calls for a repetitive structure of the kind that Birtwistle and his librettist, Stephen Plaice, have devised. The seven scenes, or “fits”, linked to phases of the moon, underpinned by cycles of nocturnes and aubades, are satisfying to contemplate, but do not draw one into the action, such as it is. One starts to feel they simply have to be got through.
The action puts modern (Edwardian) and mythical times in counterpoint. An unnamed Man and Woman had a fleeting but intense relationship on a Greek holiday in Lerna, where the rape of Io took place, and back home the Man is unwilling to forget it, though the Woman wishes him to. Unable to confront her, he keeps sending letters, and Alison Chitty’s beautiful box set, depicting the Magritte-like street (under a changing moon) on which she lives, and putting the outside of her house and its Vermeer-ish interior side by side as inverted mirror images, amusingly lets us see the Man posting his letter and the Woman receiving it simultaneously.
There is little more to the modern action than the varying ritual of the Man delivering letters and the Woman dismayedly reading them. But she also reads about Io, and when she falls asleep, she dreams of what she’s read. The whole lurid myth — involving not only “overspawny Zeus” but the jealous Hera and the gadfly with which she torments the altered Io — is enacted by masked figures of the sort used by Birtwistle in The Mask of Orpheus. Electronic “ auras”, also familiar from that opera, and here resembling crickets in the heat, signal these mythical excursions. At the end, the two worlds are mixed up. The awakened Mysteries of Lerna compel the Woman into action. Inverting sexual roles, she does not exactly rape the Man, but writes furiously on this letter-writer’s chest.
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Oddly enough, letter-writing is crucial to The Turn of the Screw, too, in an electrifying way that makes its use here a shallow conceit by comparison. Writing on the body does not produce poetry. For that, one has to look to the visuals and the music, though hardly to the vocal lines. They are as grudging as any in latter-day opera, and much of the text is spoken (two actors are among the cast of six, all doubling roles). In the argumentative quartet of Fit V, the voices (Claire Booth, Amy Freston, Sam McElroy, Richard Morris) rarely sing at the same time. To sing and to sting, gadfly-fashion, are much the same thing in this opera, though the stings were effectively administered by the two sopranos. It is in the writing for the players, given Fit I to themselves, that lyricism lies, for all the metrical complication of the idiom. Quatuor Diotima and Alan Hacker, who also conducted, brilliantly conveyed the opera’s sempiternal song, which finds in the ancient and modern worlds a common melancholy.