Simon Jenner May 19th 2024 Photo Credit The Dome
Ed Hughes’ mesmerising States of Innocence, conducted by Andrew Gourlay with stage direction by Tim Hopkins was given a single performance at Dome Corn Exchange as part of the Brighton Festival on May 19th.
It’s a semi-staged opera lasting 85 minutes with libretto by Peter Cant, exploring doubleness: characters flit in and out of Milton’s Paradise Lost and back intothe poet organising his household to help him write his masterpiece. It’s depicted as a “dreamlike unfolding” of Milton sleeping on his vision, counterpointed with daytime writing and dictating.
The opera’s resolutely tonal, though if that suggests Jonathan Dove’s Flight, it’s spikier, with an onstage instrumental septet both dissonant and harmonically daring. Tonal, but not minimalist, it’s an approachable but beguilingly contemporary idiom. Flute and clarinet lead through strings and piano a punchy, never vehement score.
Like the poem 12 scenes traverses the arc of G major – the music’s home key, traditionally depicting optimism and cheerful energy. There’s textural variety, though like the poem itself, not one of pace. Unlike the poem it doesn’t highlight the eleventh scene’s Fall as musically catastrophic. And though there’s correlation between these scenes and Milton’s 12 books, that’s not (happily) adhered to rigidly. Yet it holds attention.
Partly that’s visual. There’s a hard-working complement to the necessarily static nature of performance. 12 sections are signalled on Ian Winters’ projection design filling the backdrop. It shimmers with period jottings and manuscripts, scientific images and what seems a psychedelic ride through a 17th century library: which features enlarged images of performers whilst sliding each projection to fresh imagery.
For instance the purely instrumental section VIII ‘Interlude’ (giving singers a well-earned break) allows us to imagine Milton in his younger days contemplating harmonies of planets Johannes Kepler envisaged, original drawings turned into a graphic dance of the spheres.
Lighting from Beth O’Leary and Jazmin Field draws performers into this field. There’s a complementary colour-blocking with various shades emanating from the stage itself.
Melodically there’s a spiral ascent. Each section’s introduced with for instance ‘Supplication’ to begin and finally ‘Banishment’.
Five soloists are deployed unevenly, four named. In nearly every scene Milton (Sir John Tomlinson) is to the fore. His bass-baritone cuts magnificently through as narrator and almost as a continuo voice, leading vocally through the different timbres.
Eve (Rozanna Madylus) in an eloquent deep-toned soprano, soars into self-knowledge over sustained coloratura lines: not just as Eve but Wife too. She enjoys the next most extended role in her doubled world as Eve.
In the third part ‘Eve’s Awakening’ she’s joined by high soprano Rachel Duckett (piercing and sharp-edged to Madylus’s richness) as her reflection. That’s when Eve notices in a pool how beautiful she is.
Madylus’ role as Wife isn’t as sharply defined, and one wonders what kind of opera Hughes and Cant might have addressed if they’d made more use of the chorus (Zofia Reeves, Liz Webb, Natasha Stone) here standing in as Milton’s three put-upon daughters. They allegedly stole his books for money, being kept so meanly; and to an extent rebelled, even sabotaged Milton’s work.
In the faster tempo of the second section ‘The Household’ there’s a tantalisingly brief agency for Reeves, Webb and Stone as daughters aroused to work as amanuenses: yet one longs for definition, dramatic bickering.
As it is, Secretary (often scurrilous nephew John Philips who brought those charges against Milton’s daughters) gets the discontent, though not explicit motive. His chief role is Satan where lyric tenor Thomas Elwin, standing in for Stuart Jackson, is allowed some agency.
In the fifth section (‘Satan’s Entrance into Paradise’) and seventh (Perdition’) sections full of slithering lyricism – and surprisingly light textures – Elwin revels in high sliding scales and what Hughes and Cant also posit as Milton’s queerness depicting Satan. It’s a compelling musical logic, allowing Satan not only the best harmonies but someone writhing into light.
The poet Andrew Marvell also acted as amanuensis, saving Milton from prison and execution. Now that’s an opera on its own.
Adam (Matthew Farrell standing in at very short notice for Tim Morgan), has less to do, but as a lower tenor he’s able to echo Tomlinson and occasionally as in IV ‘Adam’s Account’ to carve some agency, though again and again, one wishes in this high-spec visual design the heresy of surtitles. Only Tomlinson’s ebony-carved voice cuts through with ideal clarity. That’s no reflection on singers: bass timbres usually do this.
Farrell has more to do in erotically-charged X ‘The Hour of Noon’ featuring string-ravishing textures and wide-ranging harmonies from flute to piano. That’s true of XI ‘Original Sin’ with further exchanges between Farrell and Madylus, with Tomlinson edging in. It would have been good to see interplay between Farrell and Duckett.
VI ‘The Hour of Night’ invoking Britten and Bartok’s night music is dark-hued, musically satisfying. Eden’s green is struck through with nightmarish yet sylvan possibilities. Indeed dense arboreal stretches are part of the overall visuals – in almost every section we’re treated to green thoughts and green shades (Marvell certainly comes to mind here).
The relation between composer and librettist is more equal than a blind poet imposing words on multiple helpmeets including a secretary. Nevertheless, there’s something wittily interplay between Cant and Hughes: the scurrilous secretary doubling as discontented Satan, powers behind thrones.
With Mrs Milton turning Eve without much motive, one might ask which Mrs Milton Milton had in mind? All three might have informed Milton’s imagination and one wonders what his unhappy rebellious first wife Mary might have contributed. Katherine Woodstock “my late espoused saint” died just after childbirth, yet Milton was happy with much younger Elizabeth Mynshull. Who angered her step-daughters. Cant and Hughes have opted to streamline everything to the poem, doubling to its function.
Musically this score’s seductive and 85 minutes proves hypnotically ideal. The New Music Players are superb. Karen Jones’ flute and Fiona Cross’s clarinet lead writhing upper textures, perky interjections and spiky dissonances.
They’re abetted by gorgeous low-note slithering by Alison Hughes’ bass clarinet. Just three string players – the acclaimed and much-recorded Susanne Stanzeleit on violin revels in suspended ecstatic moments, as does Bridget Carey with her viola’s added richness. Andrew Fuller, another recorded chamber soloist, adds a cello counterpoint to the bass clarinet.
Finally Ben-San Lau’s piano is everywhere, both in the score’s percussive reach and its glinting top-notes: here the piano’s the great leveller.
Following Milton’s storytelling but not its dramatic moments, States of Innocence refuses to force a different dynamic. Overall Milton’s tenor is even; so, as a dream, is this.
Though Haydn’s The Creation used Paradise Lost as a launchpad for his most innovative orchestral introduction of chaos, he dodged the Fall. Hughes has absorbed it, painlessly, as a creative state of mind.
States of Innocence
Composer: Ed Hughes
Libretto: Peter Cant
Stage Director: Tim Hopkins
Conductor: Andrew Gourlay
*Due to illness, Stuart Jackson is no longer able to perform
Brighton Dome Corn Exchange
May 19th