The beast within

Hairy chords, blood smoothies, and 'a bit of Boris' - Sir Harrison Birtwistle talks to Tom Service about his new opera, The Minotaur

'It's like this, look." Sir Harrison Birtwistle is explaining the origin of his opera The Minotaur, which premieres on Tuesday at the Royal Opera House, and he points to a Picasso print on the wall of his living room in his Wiltshire home. It's an image of the Minotaur's death, in which the final agonies of the half-bull, half-man are ogled by a small crowd of spectators. The drawing inverts the children's storybook idea of the Minotaur myth, that the beast represents pure, rapacious evil. Picasso invites us to share the Minotaur's pain, to see him as human as well as monstrous.

"That was one of the challenges of doing the piece," Birtwistle says. "We're used to only seeing the beast side of the Minotaur. We don't usually look at it and think: half of this is human. We think, that's really an animal. We're used to the idea that he is this one-dimensional thing that tears people apart. That was one of the real interests, and the real problems, about how you express that duality in theatrical terms. On stage, you have to make a decision about which it is at any point, a division between the man and the beast."

That challenge had to be met before the Minotaur could be set loose on the Royal Opera House stage. What would the man-beast look like? What sounds would he make? As Birtwistle says, "You can do a dance to the Minotaur, but if you do an opera, what does he say?"

Birtwistle knew when he took the commission for another opera from Covent Garden (his first, Gawain, was staged in 1991 and twice revived), that he wanted to write an opera for the bass John Tomlinson, who had created the role of the Green Knight in his Arthurian drama. But if Tomlinson, who plays the Minotaur, was to do more than grunt, Birtwistle and his librettist, David Harsent, had to find a way of making the Minotaur speak.

Birtwistle explains how they did it. "There are three episodes of what you might call ritual sacrifice in the piece. There's the first, when a group of Innocents go in, and the Minotaur kills and rapes one girl, the second is a massacre, and the third is when Theseus goes in and kills him. And at the end of each sacrifice, the Minotaur sleeps, and in his sleep, he dreams. And in his dreams, he can speak, and can express himself in human language." I ask him how all this is going to look on stage: will Tomlinson wear a mask throughout the opera? "I don't know. There's been a lot of discussion about that. I don't know how you do it. It's not my problem!"

Well, it is and it isn't. It's certainly one for the designer, Alison Chitty, who - like Harsent - worked with Birtwistle on Gawain. There's another clue to what the Minotaur will look like in Birtwistle's house: a little image that looks like a circle, filled in with dark colours, reds and blacks, and drawn with furious, intense mark-making. It's one of Chitty's designs for the labyrinth, like a bullring in which the Minotaur's horns have gouged and scored the surface.

It's uncanny to see this image magnified a hundred-fold on the Royal Opera stage some days later, when I attend rehearsals. The creative team, led by director Stephen Langridge, are experimenting with Tomlinson's mask. At the front of the stage, Tomlinson is having some surgery done to the Minotaur's nostrils: an electric light is being inserted into the imposing gauze headpiece that he will wear for the entire performance. It looks painful, but Tomlinson assures me later that the mask is as comfortable as it can be.

What's astonishing is the way Tomlinson animates this stage wizardry when he becomes the Minotaur. He achieves moments of anthropomorphic magic in his sacrificial scenes, toying with his first victim. But that's just one side of his character. The dream sequences, in which his human side is revealed, and in which his grunts of "Naaaaaargh!" are transformed into speech and song, are only the most obvious of Birtwistle's and Harsent's rethinkings of the myth. Harsent's libretto also subverts the conventional ideas of Ariadne and Theseus.

At its simplest, the story of the Minotaur has Theseus arriving on Crete with his load of sacrificial victims, where he meets Ariadne; they fall in love, she gives him a ball of twine (so he can find his way out of the maze), he kills the monster, returns, and they live happily ever after. (Except they don't: Theseus forgets to change his sails from black to white, the symbol of his victory when he returns home, so his father, seeing the black sails approach, kills himself. Theseus also tires of Ariadne's charms, and dumps her on Naxos, where she is rescued by Bacchus - but that's where Richard Strauss's opera takes over.)

In Harsent's version, Ariadne is far from a starry-eyed lover, Theseus much less than a glorified hero. Ariadne is trapped ("Crete is my cage," she sings), haunted by her mother's infidelity. "She doesn't want to be there," Birtwistle says, "and she's frustrated sexually, and in every other sense." For Ariadne, Theseus is an escape route. But this Theseus is an egotist who wants to kill the beast for his own vanity, not to honour Ariadne. He allows her to leave Crete with him only when she tells him how to murder the Minotaur. As Ariadne, mezzo-soprano Christine Rice shoulders the burden of the drama; Danish baritone Johan Reuter sings Theseus, a singer experienced Royal Opera watchers will remember from his chilling performance in the title role of Berg's Wozzeck a couple of seasons ago.

On the way to the final encounter in the labyrinth, there are meetings with mythic beings: the Snake Priestess, sung by counter-tenor Andrew Watts, a role that inhabits an appropriately stratospheric range - "like the Queen of the Night", according to Birtwistle - and the Keres, harpies who feast on the remains of the Minotaur's victims. Just before the end of the first half, there's the massacre, set to some of Birtwistle's most violent music. He warns that the music "has got some hairy chords in it", and he's not wrong. In a rehearsal room at the Royal Opera, a chorus of Keres screams over the orchestra at one of the first rehearsals in which voices and orchestra have been heard together. "Oh God, another one," conductor Antonio Pappano, music director of the Royal Opera, ironically laments, as Birtwistle's score heaves itself into another deathly paroxysm, an orgy of orchestral fury that ritualises the deaths of the Innocents. "They should serve blood smoothies at the interval," the leader of the orchestra, Peter Manning, says to the composer.

The dramatic trajectory of the Minotaur is clear: each of the 13 scenes builds cumulatively to the Minotaur's death. "We cut a whole sequence from the end," Birtwistle says - and then surprises me with the reason why. "In Raiders of the Lost Ark, I remember Harrison Ford saying he was going to have to rehearse for weeks and weeks for that scene when he looks round, sees this huge guy with a whip, and fights him. So he said, instead, 'Why don't I just take my gun out and shoot the fucker?' And that's what he does! We were going to have this long thing at the end with the Keres, when they were going to feed on the Minotaur's body, but it needed to be shorter, and I said, 'Why doesn't she just fly in and squawk?' So one of them tears his heart out, and that's the end. Blackout."

But the real inspiration for the final scene was John Tomlinson. "Have you heard him sing Boris, in Boris Godunov? He's fantastic. So I said, 'Let's have a bit of Boris, so the ending is this long death scene, like in the Mussorgsky.'" There is no doubt this is where your sympathies will be at the end of the opera: not for Ariadne, or Theseus, but with the half-and-half, the Minotaur.

The Minotaur's linear storytelling is a closer relative to the mythic power of Gawain than the theatrical experimentation of Birtwistle's first full-scale opera, The Mask of Orpheus. That work has only had one production in an opera house, by English National Opera in 1986. Birtwistle describes it as "the most complex piece of theatre ever devised"; Gawain, on the other hand, he thinks of as an experiment in making the vocal lines the most important thing in the drama, accompanied by "a sort of film score". What's new in the Minotaur is that Birtwistle is looking for "a proper dialogue between the vocal lines and instrumental lines. I hope it will have a different sort of clarity."

Lines: the Minotaur is full of them, musical and dramatic. An alto saxophone often plays at the same time as Ariadne - "An obbligato, I suppose you'd call it," Birtwistle says. But there is also "a sort of endless line in the whole piece". It's as if the gigantic labyrinth of the score, which plays for more than two hours, is connected by a single melodic impulse. In rehearsal, I hear the saxophone's sometimes sad, sometimes sleazy voice rise from the pit in Rice's scenes, as if Ariadne and her saxophone were improvising along with the rest of the orchestra. Birtwistle has created a huge ensemble for the Minotaur - so big that the entire percussion section can't fit underneath the stage, and the four players perform from the boxes just in front instead.

You can see Pappano relishing this music as a conductor. But that's not how it started. "When I first met Harry I said I couldn't conduct his music," Pappano says. "I'd heard Gawain, and thought it was too loud. But then we talked, and he was such a nice guy, I just had to do it." Pappano conducts his rehearsals with the same passion he gives to his performances, and galvanises his orchestra into elemental music-making, whether for the dark lyricism of the Minotaur's death-scene, or the riotous blood-orgy of the massacre.

It's hard to square the expressive extremity of Birtwistle's music with his outward demeanour at home. He cooks me a fabulous lunch, and proudly shows me his gigantic mirror carp in his beautifully sculpted pond, before giving me a tour of his composition hut, a place of spartan starkness in which his imagination is allowed free rein.

This calm oasis is where the ferocious passion of the Minotaur was born. I wonder how much of the Minotaur is in Birtwistle himself. "He's in all of us," he says, in his unreconstructed Lancashire accent. "We all have one person which is public, for the world, and we have another one that nobody knows, that not even my wife knows. You know, there are things that go on in here" - he taps his head - "which are completely, only to me, and which manifest themselves outside." The Minotaur may well prove to be Birtwistle's most personal, and most human, operatic creation.

· The Minotaur opens at the Royal Opera House, London, on Tuesday, and is in rep until May 3. Box office: 020-7304 4000.

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