Shadowtime: Introduction by Fabrice Fitch

SHADOWTIME: An introduction to the recording

by Fabrice Fitch Back

Not so long ago, the very notion of a ‘Ferneyhough opera’ might have seemed almost an oxymoron. During the last decade, during which Shadowtime came into being, the composer himself has been heard to describe opera as an “inherently dirty medium”, one of “grubby compromises” – comments which, taken at face value, would appear to confirm the impression that the composer and the genre are somehow ill-suited. Yet Ferneyhough’s published output – no less than his collected writings – shows him to be no stranger to compromise, if by that one understands a willingness to embrace pragmatic solutions to aesthetic problems. As for the music’s dramatic potential, one has only to recall his Time and Motion Studies, written in the 1970s, the last two of which address the issue of theatricality directly (albeit in a typically displaced manner). Given all this, the composer’s remarks, quoted above, need not be interpreted as disparaging: more recently, he has said that “[while] everyone is currently preoccupied with why a work is or is not an opera, what interests me is: what is an opera?”

The ‘story’ of Shadowtime is the last hours of Walter Benjamin, the cultural philosopher who took his own life in September 1940 on the Franco-Spanish frontier when he learned that the visas he and his travelling companions had secured would not be honoured by the border authorities – that they would be turned back to France to face almost certain deportation, as Jews, to the concentration camps. This narrative unfolds in the first scene (New Angels/ Transient Failures). The rest of the opera relates the adventures of Benjamin’s shade – his ‘avatar, shadow or dream figure’ – in ‘non-historical’ time: he reflects on the nature of history, time and transformation (The Doctrine of Similarity); he descends into the Underworld (Opus Contra Naturam); he is interrogated by a succession of historical figures, including a border guard (Pools of Darkness); he encounters seven representations of the Angel of History, the Angelus novus whose representation in a painting by Paul Klee had so fascinated him (Seven Tableaux); and in the last scene, Stelae for Failed Time, the Angel of History, represented by a chorus of angels, dismisses Benjamin in a final, ambiguous gesture.

From the synopsis, it is easy to see that Shadowtime departs from operatic conventions in many ways: the ‘narrative’ is largely confined to the first scene (which is, ironically perhaps, subtitled ‘Prologue’!); and in subsequent panels the relation to an unfolding ‘plot’ is often tangential at best: most obviously, the second scene (Les froissments d’ailes de Gabriel, to all intents and purposes a ‘guitar concerto’) contains neither action nor vocal music. In several scenes, Charles Bernstein’s inventive libretto takes upon itself the role of ‘subject’ in the absence of any story. Finally, all but scenes 1 and 5 can be performed as freestanding concert pieces. Hence, the opera presents no unified surface from a textural standpoint: each scene has its own scoring, but the lack of continuity is compensated for to some extent by elements of symmetry. Once again, it is the first scene that most closely approximates a ‘normative’, chamber-orchestral format. This ensemble remains more or less intact for Scene 2, and returns in Scene 6 which also sees the re-appearance of the narrator/lecturer of Scene 1. The chorus, whose members assume the roles of individual characters in Scenes 1 and 5, appear as a body in Scenes 3 and 7: a small chamber ensemble (consisting of violin, piano, clarinets and percussion) accompanies it in Scene 3, and a pre-recorded electro-acoustic soundtrack in the final scene. Scene 4, the mid-point of the opera and in many ways its programmatic core, involves a single, speaking pianist.

But for all this flouting convention, Ferneyhough’s attitude to the genre is not iconoclastic, let alone disrespectful, but speculative. He has described Shadowtime as an “opera of ideas”, in the sense that “one can consider ideas as ‘beings with a life of their own’”. In each scene, Bernstein’s libretto creatively re-interprets aspects of Benjamin’s ideas. In this connection, Ferneyhough cites Mozart’s Magic Flute, and also the tradition of the early oratorio (for example Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo, in which the principal characters are not human beings or mythical figures but abstract concepts). This reference to early stage works is key to an understanding of Ferneyhough’s conception of opera: allegorical figures are regularly encountered in the prologues of early operas or intermedii (for example La Pellegrina of 1589 or Monteverdi’s Orfeo of 1607). More explicitly, the adventures of Benjamin’s ‘shade’ have distinct echoes of Greek myth, particularly the Orpheus legend: the interrogations of scene 5 call to mind both Oedipus and the Sphinx and Orfeo’s crossing of the Styx after having first lulled Caronte to sleep. To be sure, these references reflect Ferneyhough’s abiding affection for Italian music of the early Baroque; but they also allow him to speculate on the paths that the genre might have taken during the early stages of its development, when its definition and conventions (for example, the boundary between oratorio and opera) were yet to become fixed or standardized. (From this same period dates the high-point of Western culture’s fascination with magic and alchemy, which Ferneyhough specifically invokes in the title of Scene 4.) Seen in this broader historical context, Shadowtime begins to make more sense: neither ‘anti-opera’ (Ferneyhough: “I have no intention of blowing up opera-houses”) nor ‘anti-anti-opera’, but ‘ante-opera’.

At the same time, its debt to modern scores is also evident: its ‘modular’ structure, alluded to earlier, recalls Stockhausen’s Licht (whose individual scenes may similarly be performed separately) and the multi-movement cycles of Ferneyhough himself (Carceri d’Invenzione), and of younger composers like Richard Barrett. Likewise, the extended interlude of Scene 2, which allows for the projection of images in real time (as happened in the production of which the present CD is a record), can be likened to the long ‘film-sequence’ at the mid-point of Berg’s Lulu. Wozzeck is also invoked in the plan of Scene 5, each of whose movements refers to a specific musical form of the past – though as one might expect, Ferneyhough’s range of references, from isorhythm and madrigal to heterophony, is wider than Berg’s. Finally, the extent to which the plot is left unresolved (since at no point is the moment of Benjamin’s death explicitly represented) harks back to Schoenberg’s unfinished opera, Moses und Aron; hence, as Charles Bernstein has suggested, another reason for which Scene 2 should contain no action. This last parallel can be extended in the output of both composers: Ferneyhough’s Fourth String Quartet (1989-90) also drew on Schoenberg’s failure to complete his Second Quartet according to his initial plan, without a soprano. Failure is another of Shadowtime’s recurring themes.

Ferneyhough’s characterization of opera as a ‘grubby’ medium has several implications for Shadowtime; for one thing, the choice of Benjamin as subject. He is not a hero like Orpheus, nor an anti-hero like Wozzeck; Ferneyhough was drawn to him precisely because he was neither. As the composer put it to Philippe Albèra, ‘I chose him because I think he was not dishonest, while many intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s were working for their own benefit, trying to escape into a sort of inner world or, literally, to another country... Benjamin, too, was guilty of moral weakness at that time... [but] there are those who act in bad faith to protect themselves, and others, like him, who actually live out their lack of realism... I hope that what I say or suggest about him will be seen to apply to each of us. I am no exception...’ Ferneyhough and Bernstein see a parallel with our own time in that ‘[we], too, are looking for a little space in which to hide... The image of a coherent whole is no longer accessible to us, because mediators and power itself have reduced it to tiny fragments.’ In fact, Shadowtime consists almost entirely of fragments and short movements: thirteen canons, eleven interrogations, seven tableaux, and the no fewer than 128 fragments that make up Scene 2. (This ‘fragment-structure’, with its prevalence of prime numbers, is mirrored througout the libretto.) As to the ‘coherent whole’, the drama, no less than the music, consists of multiple layers: Scene 1 combines the action at Port Bou with several other layers taking place in different historical periods, one of which includes Benjamin’s younger self; and the interrogators of Scene 5 are also drawn from different periods of history. On a musical level, the opera’s seven scenes overlap (for example, the music of Scene 2 starts before the ‘triple lecture’ at the end of Scene 1 has concluded), and they may revisit each other’s materials: the piano part of Amphibolies III (Scene 3) quotes the quasi-serial layer that opens the third section of Opus Contra Naturam.

The parallel between Benjamin’s predicament and the contemporary situation is handled with a certain lightness of touch; but a didactic ‘preachiness’ would anyway be quite foreign to Ferneyhough’s manner. (Lecturers and lectures, several of whom intervene at different points of the opera, are usually portrayed, tongue-in-cheek, as pedantic.) There is an undoubted irony in the reversal that takes place between Scene 2, which the composer describes as “a portal or an altarpiece... [and] a point of no return, like the expulsion from the Garden of Eden”, and Scene 4, the portal to the Underworld, located in a fictional place mid-way between Las Vegas and 1920s Weimar. One also notes the glancing allusion to another notable ‘hell-mouth’ of contemporary popular culture (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and the bitter, final irony in the location of Las Vegas itself, the United States, which was to have been a safe haven for Benjamin, the final destination of his abortive journey. This range of cultural references takes Ferneyhough’s music into hitherto uncharted territory: the slapstick of Groucho Marx (Scene 5) and the Liberace-like pianist of Opus contra naturam (“Knock knock. Who’s there?”) reach a paroxysm in the Seven Tableaux, in which the contrabass clarinet emits a succession of equivocal noises, and the brass intone a descending riff straight out of a low-brow comedy sound-track. (This ‘slippage’ of playful displacements is an explicit response to the libretto, which deals similarly with language.) More seriously, the ‘compromises’ of the genre allow Ferneyhough to engage with musical style (a fundamental aspect of his compositional thinking) in new and unexpected ways. The fragmented sound-world of Opus contra naturam admits of some surprising deviations (or, better, ‘deviances’) towards tonal and post-tonal pianism. These allusions are as poignant as they are brief: they flash past in an instant, the merest hint – as though one had recognized familiar objects thrown up in some natural cataclysm – and are as soon swallowed up again. For Shadowtime is, ultimately, an opera of catastrophe.

But neither the lurches into slapstick nor the opera’s ultimately pessimistic conclusion exclude music of great refinement and poetic allusiveness. The only scene in which the human voice is absent, Les froissement d’Ailes de Gabriel, contains some of the work’s most immediately involving music. Elsewhere, however, vocal writing, and the voice more generally, naturally hold a special place in Shadowtime. The choral music in particular, with its mostly objective stance towards actions and things (rather in the manner of a Greek chorus, in opposition to ‘characters’), is a strong presence, the impact of whose interventions is experienced like a thread throughout the work. It is the chorus that has, almost, the final word at the end: almost, but not quite. For in Stelae for Failed Time, it is the composer’s voice – not his metaphorical voice, but the ‘real’ one – that speaks to Benjamin (or to himself?) in an invented, ‘negative vector’ language, circling the auditorium in a final fade-out. Ferneyhough has rarely, if ever, been so revealing of himself; and the fact that the voice is hedged round with signals of artificiality – pre-recorded, distorted, and speaking a ‘universally foreign’ language – in no way lessens the significance of such a gesture, on the part of a composer who has said that he experiences his own self as a construction of his music, and not the other way round.

Top Back