Composer Jonathan Dove: taking opera outside the opera house
Composer Jonathan Dove
Photo credit: Marshall Light Studio
Ask English composer Jonathan Dove to describe one of his most memorable career moments and he’ll probably choose the time a samba band, representing Oliver Cromwell’s avenging army, “burst through the main doors of Peterborough Cathedral, battling with the organ, sweeping up the 600 performers and as many audience, and leading them out across the market square and into a huge shopping mall, where young angels came singing down the escalators.” It was 1995, and the work was his opera In Search of Angels, the third and largest community work he composed for Glyndebourne Opera.
In Search of Angels by Jonathan Dove
Young singers descend the elevators in a shopping mall in Peterborough in the community opera in 1995.
Dove arrives in New Zealand soon for NZ Opera’s production of his much-smaller opera, Mansfield Park, based on Jane Austen’s novel and a different manifestation of his belief that opera doesn’t need to take place in a purpose-built opera house. Since the 1990’s he has composed more than thirty operas, combining professional opera singers and orchestral musicians with community singers and instrumentalists and taking over venues as varied as the ballroom on the end of Hastings Pier and a local village church.
His most recent large-scale work is called The Monster in the Maze, commissioned in 2015 by the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra and Festival d’Art Lyrique d'Aix-en-Provence, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle and performed in so many countries it has been translated into seven languages including Catalan, Chinese and Swedish.
Sir Simon Rattle conducting The Monster in the Maze
Dove’s large-scale work for mixed professional and amateur forces was commissioned by two orchestras and a festival in 2015, and widely performed in seven different languages.
The child of two architects and a mother who also played the piano, the young Dove started “making things up” at the keyboard, had piano lessons and played organ and viola. He spent his Saturdays at a music centre which included lessons and ensembles and led to playing in youth orchestras, including the London Schools Symphony Orchestra. “It was an amazing and intense experience,” he says now, “playing quite ambitious programmes. For the first course, aged 15, I played Mahler’s 1st Symphony with a 19-year-old Simon Rattle. Imagine! It was just brilliant.”
He was in the 6th form when this youth orchestra undertook a three-week tour of the US. Dove, ever versatile, played viola in the orchestra, the organ at a Carnegie Hall concert, piano in music by Charles Ives and celeste in a work by Gustav Holst. He describes the experience as “great training in how orchestras work and how orchestral music works.” Alongside developing his orchestral understanding, he sang in choirs. “Our school choir wasn’t amazing, but we sang Fauré’s Requiem and before my voice broke, I sang the Pie Jesu in that work. Slightly flat, I’m told, but to me it sounded good.”
“Super-choir” events under the Royal Schools of Church Music had the biggest influence on Dove’s later compositions. “Choirs all over London would come together, and maybe 1,000 voices would sing in a cathedral. Being part of something so big, making such an impressive sound even though none of us had incredible voices, led many years later to my writing community operas for big forces.”
A phone call changed his life. After graduating from university in Cambridge, where he’d studied composition with Robin Holloway, Dove was out of funds after travelling in India and the US. He called a friend about free-lance work and was told to “go and play for Handel opera on Monday morning.” He turned up and found himself accompanying counter-tenor James Bowman in rehearsal. “It was like stumbling into a great adventure,” he laughs. “I’d heard Bowman singing the role of Apollo in Britten’s Death in Venice at the Royal Opera House. I couldn’t believe that not only was I accompanying this wonderful, world-class singer, I was being paid to do it.”
Dove free-lanced for some years, playing for opera rehearsals, becoming assistant chorus master, doing outreach work and several successful community operas. “That was my apprenticeship. Along the way I assisted two of Glyndebourne’s directors, Graham Vick and Richard Jones, and learned a lot from both. Quite often the conductor was David Parry. When I finally came to write a main stage opera for Glyndebourne, I wanted those people involved, so I asked for Parry to conduct it and Jones to direct it.”
That opera was Flight, premiered at Glyndebourne Opera House in 1998 and sometimes described as Dove’s “breakthrough” work. Set in an unspecified airport, its plot was inspired by the true-life story of an Iranian refugee who lived at Charles de Gaulle Airport for 18 years. The central character, the Refugee, is trapped at the airport because he doesn’t have documentation to enter the country. Other characters are trapped by a storm that grounds the planes.
Jonathan Dove’s much-performed opera Flight in a US production
Image credit: The Dallas Opera
Flight has had around forty productions, in numerous British, European, and US opera houses and at Australia’s Adelaide Festival in 2006. Asked about its popularity, Dove suggests people are drawn to the world of Flight’s story. “It’s not just that they like the music - the central character’s predicament is so intriguing. We’ve become more sensitized to refugees, and the refugee experience is painfully visible in Europe. In a way Flight seems more topical than when I wrote it 25 years ago. The productions seem quite different each time; it’s humbling and inspiring to see something you’ve made in a particular way sparking the imaginations of so many people.”
Our conversation about contemporary themes in Flight moved to the opera that is bringing Dove to New Zealand for the first time, Mansfield Park, set in early 19th century England. The chamber-scale opera, with a cast of ten singers accompanied by two pianists, will be presented by NZ Opera in small settings, the wedding venue Settlers Country Manor in West Auckland and Wellington’s historic Public Trust Hall. Through his community opera work, Dove says, he’s come to believe opera is “too important to be restricted to the opera house, and that not everyone feels they belong or are entitled to be there - or that it will be enjoyable.”
Will New Zealand audiences find Austen’s story relevant? “I never want to tell audiences what to think,” Dove says, after a thoughtful pause. “But the underlying story of Mansfield Park is the same as Cinderella, a story of enduring popularity. There’s a message there related to wealth and class: there are flashy, captivating and plausible people who may not be the best people; quiet, unassuming people may have hidden depths and the humblest person can be seen and valued.”
Dove’s chamber opera Mansfield Park at the Waterperry Opera Festival
Image credit: Robert Workman
Musically, Dove says, Mansfield Park is not pastiche. “I wasn’t trying to sound like the music of 1815. Librettist Alasdair Middleton and I were particularly interested in the element of formality in the story. We wanted something of the restraint in the manners of the period; some behaviours were not possible, and people couldn’t be physically free with each other. So, there’s a kind of restraint in the music.”
He compares it to Stravinsky’s neo-classical use of 19th century music in The Rake’s Progress. Mozart, too, has always been an important influence for Dove, with Cosí fan tutte among his first operatic experiences as a student. “Mozart died before the period of Mansfield Park, but somehow the world of Austen feels more akin to the world of Mozart than, say, Beethoven.”
New Zealand Opera’s NZ premiere season of Mansfield Park
…in small venues in Wellington and Auckland April 2024
While in New Zealand, Dove and Middleton will work alongside opera singer Kawiti Waetford as facilitators and mentors for a five-day wananga, which NZ Opera is calling a New Opera Forum. It will bring together some of Aotearoa’s “story-telling creatives” to explore the creation of new operatic work. He sees the Forum as the beginning of “an offering of encouragement and support.” After creating operas over three decades, Dove has a lot of wisdom to share.
“My experience has been that you can learn an awful lot by working on a small scale before a big scale. I’ve written operas for six people, operas in churches, in community spaces…we’ll be looking at the different scales on which operas can happen. You can practice story-telling techniques on a small scale, and I was lucky to have that experience offered to me. It’s nice to have the opportunity to share some of the things I’ve been thinking about for a long time – how you tell a story effectively, how music can reveal character and significance - and also give pleasure.”
New Zealand Opera Mansfield Park Jonathan Dove (composer), Alasdair Middleton (librettist) Rebecca Meltzer (Director) David Kelly and Soomin Kim (pianos) Ashlynn Timms (Fanny Price) Mr Rushworth (Andrew Grenon) Sir Thomas Bertram (Robert Tucker) Lady Bertram (Kristin Darragh) Wellington 17-18 April and Auckland 21 April. Tickets and more information here
New Opera Forum convened by NZ Opera April 22-26, Gallagher Performing Arts Academy, Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato, Waikato University. More information here