In Parenthesis: The Making of the Opera

This year marks the 70th birthday of Welsh National Opera.

It's also the centenary of the Battle of the Somme.

The company's artistic director marked both occasions

by commissioning a brand-new opera.

New operas are very big things to put on.

It's a big... You know, it's a big baby to take a risk with.

As with any new work, there are elements of risk involved

but, you know, it has to be that way, it has to be a living art form.

I think you've got to allow creative people their head to do that

and, you know, yes, there'll be plenty of discussion.

The new work is based on the epic First World War poem In Parenthesis

by writer, painter and calligrapher David Jones.

His typography inspired the lettering on the Wales Millennium Centre,

where the much-anticipated production opened in May.

Reaching the stage was the culmination

of some three years' work.

We were allowed behind the scenes

to reveal what goes into making a new opera.

In Parenthesis somehow tapped me on the shoulder as a subject.

Emma Jenkins got in touch with me and said she and her husband

had been working on this David Jones text, In Parenthesis,

and they were thinking that it might need music,

and did I have any ideas?

David gave me this book in 1990.

And it was so that we had twin copies.

Twins, like that.

We'd have been preparing for our finals at the time.

It was on my birthday.

This is the very copy that I, as you can see, have heavily annotated,

for the writing of the libretto.

For me, it's always about having a clear overview of structure

before anything else, and of simple storytelling.

Whereas I have a lot of emotional attachment to a lot of the detail

in the book. So we worked out a process where,

if we tried to work in the same room together it wouldn't be productive,

probably a recipe for divorce.

Because it's written by a painter, the poem's so visual.

It's like a series of storyboards.

We see the group of young men at the start

of their basic training in England.

They then embark towards France, where they make their way south

towards the Somme and then to Mametz,

where they almost in their entirety meet their death.

But in the course of that story,

he is moving from a very realistic presentation of their experience

through to more and more interconnectedness

with the sort of mythical dimensions,

which is really what the poem is actually about.

World War I soldiers will suddenly morph into becoming

sixth-century warriors of Gododdin,

or Agincourt, or Arthur's knights, even.

So we found a subject, a libretto and quite shortly after that...

..Iain Bell wrote to me and sent me some of his music and, you know,

I just somehow felt the whole thing had kind of fallen into place.

So lovely to see you.

Still in his mid-30s,

Iain Bell is a rising young star in the opera world.

Following works in Vienna and Houston,

In Parenthesis will be his third opera.

Before Iain wrote a note of music,

we sat down in the Southbank Centre over a series of very long meetings.

The purpose of the meetings at point wasn't to do any kind of fashioning

of the libretto, it had been done.

It was purely and simply to help me understand it.

Understand the parallel worlds that are running alongside in the opera.

-Exactly.

-The mythical world running alongside the temporal, real world.

To be able to create a Celtic Arthurian sound world,

it is just too much to resist.

So I started writing January 2014.

I start from the beginning, I start from word one, page one,

and I write a very, very basic piano vocal score.

I do the digital equivalent of writing it on manuscript paper.

SYNTHESISED MUSIC PLAYS

And then I revisit the piece and then I start orchestrating it.

I work eight hours, seven - eight hours a day when I'm writing, so...

Two minutes of music, yeah, is kind of what I get out of a day's work.

The next stage is very simple, it's engaging the design team.

And in this case that's just one person,

which is Robert Innes Hopkins.

You obviously start with reference material,

conversations with the director, bouncing around ideas.

You don't think we want to do something green?

Yes, we do. Something huge...

..which can come down and...

Richie sings a lot through this last scene.

It's not going to be that easy.

Well, there's a way of linking her to it.

The climax of both the book and the opera takes place in a wood -

Mametz Wood,

the site of one of the earliest and most destructive battles

of the Somme Offensive.

The Royal Welch Fusiliers suffered massive casualties.

Over 1,000 men were killed in two days.

David Jones was among the wounded.

It's an iconic spot for people who remember Welsh history.

Robert Innes Hopkins and I planned as part of our work on the opera

actually to go and visit Mametz Wood.

The Germans were actually in retreat.

The next phase was to come down through here,

which is why thought we should walk this way because this is where he...

You know, this is exactly where he went.

It was an extraordinary thing to get a feeling for the landscape,

which is clearly described in the poem.

Walking into the wood and finding the trench,

which is on David Jones's map...

The trench is still clearly visible 100 years later and there are still

bits of unexploded artillery lying around,

so you can feel that the whole thing is still there, really.

The iPhone meets a 100-year-old shell.

So he's just walked into the wood...

..and then he says,

"All alone in the deepest shades, caught between Rowan and Hazel,

"Foxes are fleeing, unicorns break cover, the warrens are in shock.

"The birds cry out as their nests fall like stars

"And their airy world's gone crazed."

While the design process continues,

Iain Bell keeps in touch with the singers.

Bidlack.

The central character, Private John Ball,

will be sung by Andrew Bidlack,

who is making his debut at New York's Metropolitan Opera.

So, would you like me to send you the MP3 of the piano?

My teacher's here and once things...

Things are very intense right now at the Met,

but once they settle down I'm going to see him and there's

certain parts that I really want to work on, especially vocally.

Yeah.

Like the aria. It's a long line and an ascending arc

through the whole thing and then in, out through the passaggio,

and that is something you just want to have a plan for

and know exactly what you're doing in it.

The character of John Ball sings almost nonstop from start to finish.

It is the triathlon of a role.

It's a huge challenge for the tenor.

# The birds cry out as their nests fall like stars

# Their airy world's gone crazed... #

We didn't want to represent the First World War

in any kind of realistic way.

I think I had had this thought

that the whole thing could be taking place in a, like,

a little Welsh chapel somewhere.

We have that with the details of the two windows.

The ladies' chorus would be up on the upper chapel

and it allows them to be looking down into the pit

where the story's telling.

We have this piece, which sits as a header for most of the opera,

but flies in slowly and gives us our trench.

So Paul will crawl up and will be inside the war memorial and this is

happening at a point in the opera where it's Christmas day,

the German trenches are singing.

MAN SINGS IN GERMAN

The back of sets is always the most interesting part because then

you can see how stuff's working.

And the trench itself is stuck on the back of what is otherwise

a set of flat frames. And so I literally assemble

a virtual version of this thing,

I put the boltholes on, get the pieces next to each other,

check the boltholes are all lining up.

Then I've also got to make sure this piece doesn't sag

when it's being climbed on.

So, these are the walls for the set for In Parenthesis.

So there's a stained kind of wood feel to it,

a richness like you would find in a chapel wooden wall,

and then there's going to be some planks. So they're going to look

a little bit more distressed, like in a First World War trench.

The finished design has been under construction but the final phase,

the sort of six-week rehearsal phase, begins this morning.

Welcome to the launch of In Parenthesis,

a very exciting and wonderful project.

Does anyone have any questions?

-Why not?

-LAUGHTER

I've got a big question - how the hell do we put this on the stage?

I guess we're going to find out!

# Get on parade! Get on parade!

# Oh, God, late again!

# Christ, I'm sorry, so sorry

# Need to look where I'm bloody well going.

# Oh, Christ

# It's Sergeant Snell. #

Usually, all the really big decisions get made

in the first two weeks of rehearsal, so it's a very important time.

At the moment we're both sort of freezing whilst the bard is singing.

-Is that...?

-Yeah, I think that's right.

I think that... Listen, I'm feeling my way

with how we deal with madness, outbreaks, bards intervening.

You know, it's a kind of... But let's say you...

The last time I saw David was at my audition a year ago and...

So we're working together for the first time.

-You don't need to overplay this.

-OK.

I think we need to introduce people gradually to this idea

that from time to time we get all these inner thoughts.

Sure.

John Ball is a young, clumsy, Frank Spencer-like boy of 17, maybe.

When he has these visions,

I've got the opportunity to explore the Rossini tenor.

So this is a tenor voice that's capable of flurried coloratura movements,

which can be very thrilling.

# The houndsman is wielding his horn

# My ear on the ground

# I feel a breath of dogs... #

But in Act One he has an aria, For All The Fear In This Dark Night,

and it's all on the legato.

It's all very long-winded phrases...

..that require a stillness and a young Mozartian tenor sound.

More elegant lines.

# For all the fear

# In this dark night... #

Really use the word "fear" and "dark night".

I think you want to get...

-You want to get a darker sense in the first two phrases.

-OK.

So that you can really expand with the sense of blessedness.

-OK.

-You see what I mean? That should be the growth through the line.

# For all the fear... #

A large part of the acting of an opera singer

is the way in which they treat the articulation of the words.

How you say "for all the fear in that dark night",

how you use those words in your singing voice is kind of, probably,

60% of the acting.

# There is a kind of blessedness. #

This was John Ball's big aria that I was getting ready to take

to my teacher in New York.

Now we're building another piece to the puzzle of the complete picture

each time we work on it.

I think I unfortunately caught a little bit of a head cold

on the plane so I'm kind of in a fog today.

# There is a kind of blessedness... #

We've staged already more than half of act one

by the morning of day three, so we're moving right along here.

# Mae bys Meri-Ann wedi brifo

# A Dafydd y gwas ddim yn iach... #

In the opening scene of act two,

John Ball's platoon bursts into Iain Bell's arrangement of a song popular

with the Welsh Regiment during the First World War,

the traditional Sosban Fach.

'The singing of this song becomes for Ball a hallucinatory experience.'

What I was... What I was thinking of doing was...

..that we start the song off and then when we get

into the second verse, or whatever it is,

we kind of get up and we're all going to come onto the platform.

Ball is left there on his own and we, like, become a sort of...

You know, a sort of rugby crowd.

And you've all coalesced into this phalanx and we're kind of...

Oi, oi!

And he thinks, "Oh, God, they're going to actually kill me."

Oi, oi!

That was nice, wasn't it?

I'll have another beer, thank you.

He's so relaxed. He gives you the impression of winging it,

but actually he knows exactly what he's doing all the time.

If you can have the confidence to know

that you're going to find a way through,

but you find your way through in the moment of doing it,

I think that's a much more creative way of working and it just helps

everybody to feel that they're also part of that.

Oi, oi!

# A'r gath wedi sgrapo Joni bach. #

Oi! Oi!

# It's time for another one. Won't you? #

The appointment of David Pountney as artistic director

was a fantastic one for Welsh National Opera.

He brings a depth and intelligence and an understanding of opera

as entertainment.

If anybody were to ask me, you know,

"Why did you appoint David Pountney?"

The answer would have to be,

"Why would you not appoint David Pountney?"

You know, David came to us in 2011.

He was a world figure, he had been director of productions at ENO,

at Scottish Opera.

He had an extraordinary distinguished freelance career.

He'd been running the Bregenz Festival in Austria.

But I think what impressed me at the time when I first met David,

I was asking the question, "Why does David actually want to do it?"

In a way, I think it was sort of payback time.

I thought, you know, I've learnt an awful lot about

how this all works

and maybe I could bring some of that back to a British company.

We've done more new work in the last five years

than we had done in the previous 20.

The tradition over the past 70 years has been basically

one new work every decade

and I think we've sort of moved it up to one new work,

on average, every year,

which is closer to what I think it ought to be.

When you're kind of doing more new work, it means new sets

and more different, kind of, technical elements that we need.

But I think it really excites us.

It invigorates us.

To advise on the military aspects of the production,

David Pountney brings in Lieutenant General Jonathon Riley.

-Shall I just demonstrate what you're going to do?

-Yes.

He's from David Jones's old regiment, the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

I'll just do it for you.

Taking the weight with the right hand, bring it across the body

and put it onto the left shoulder,

and with the left hand catch it under the butt.

Another short pause and bring the right hand to the side.

OK? So, shall we just try that?

Platoon.

Pause.

No, it's... Yeah.

The other left.

And on the word of command, "march", the left foot goes.

OK, that's the executive.

Is it possible not to say, "Left, left, left, right, left?"

"Can you say left, right, left, right?"

Because we're not the American army, you see.

This has been pretty detailedly composed, unfortunately.

So we are in the American army!

Sorry about that!

# Left! Left! Left, right, left!

# Left! Left! Left, right, left! #

This rare footage of David Jones has never been shown before.

He spoke in a nursing home a year before his death in 1974.

Two strokes had badly affected his speech,

but not his mental faculties.

Though he rose to prominence as both an artist and poet in later years,

the war never really left David Jones.

He saw more active service than any of the other war writers

and unlike most of them, he remained a private.

In his later life and work he would explore the meaning of wars

for the common soldier.

David Jones was very disturbed by the experiences that he'd had

and it took him, basically, 18 years to get round

to trying to write down what this meant.

He understood every soldier standing in shitty clothes

with his feet wet eating lousy food

as the same bloke who was at Agincourt,

the same bloke who was with Alexander,

caught up in these massive forces

that are like the clash of great ancient mythological powers.

My hope is music will help the text to appeal to many more people.

OK, all right?

Off we go. Platoon.

And up...

and over...

and down.

When he finished to say "Number Seven Platoon",

physically it's in four but you will do,

you know, boom, first movement,

three,

two, one.

-So this is sort of...

-Yeah.

So it's one and two and three and four.

Firstly you start with the singers

and then comes the moment with the orchestra.

The first orchestra rehearsal is a remarkable occasion.

These sounds are being created for the very first time.

And that is always a very exciting and also scary moment

because this is the moment when you as a conductor,

you verify what you thought

and what you imagine is actually coming out in the real world.

When I finish writing an opera, when I finish writing anything,

it's the greatest privilege to be able to hand it over

and to delegate. "Right, go play."

CARLO HUMS MELODY

This passage of music takes the platoon into Mametz Wood,

where it is The Queen of the Woods, sung by Alexandra Deshorties,

who kills them.

Put me back on the platform!

She becomes The Destroyer, Sweet Sister Death.

What is the effect that you want?

No, I'm just trying to find a way of capturing what he's saying

in his text about, you know,

death being this debauched creature who's leering and smiling.

How about choosing a few men and, like, picking them

one at a time, crouching, jumping on the next?

I think I should try and set it up like a sort of dance of death,

so that Ball is in the middle and the men are in some kind of

stylised circle and she's pouncing on one

and the other and the next one.

-Yeah.

-Do you see what I'm saying?

I mean, I can only do this with the guys.

Now, guys...

This is a dance of death, right?

Each step is like another strange, contorted position.

Yeah, like that? Ready.

Five, six, seven, eight.

And moving slowly, sort of tiny steps round.

Keep going.

More exaggerated, more grotesque.

OK, right, right, that's the kind of thing.

OK, now, on top of that...

..Lexi is going to come and devour several of you one by one.

Why don't you start out here?

OK.

So you have a nice journey across the floor.

And you're going to come and jump and...

My question is, do they stay in a circle

or when I take them down do they go down?

-They go down.

-They go down, OK.

So the circle is broken at that point.

CHORAL SINGING

Three, four, five, step!

# Sweet sister death

# Has gone debauched today

# She stalks the wood from the high ground

# She is not right

# She cannot veil her appetite

# But leers from you to me

# From me to you... #

As the opera moves to its conclusion,

the women's chorus become tree spirits

to create Mametz Wood on stage.

They dismember the platoon in a violent scene

arranged by fight director Kev McCurdy.

Then you've got...

Ahh!

-ALL:

-Ahh!

Beautiful! You've all got good stuff, I'm loving it,

but I just want to make it more dirty, all right?

Good. Show me.

Yes.

Yeah. So that happens to here and then you can rip.

Nice.

Bang, bang, bang.

Nice, nice, nice.

# For all the fear... #

The sitzprobe is the first time that the singers and the chorus

sing with an orchestra rather than with a piano

or piano reduction.

And this is very important because the sound is completely different.

# To my cold, black love... #

'So there are always a little bit of adjustments to do.'

I'm happy, you know, to go slower.

Maybe just a tick slower, just a tick.

-I don't want to obviously go too slowly.

-That's fine, that's fine.

When you actually see people putting themselves through the physical

strain of singing in a moment that's particularly special to you,

it validates what you've done and all the hard work you put in.

It just makes you feel you're doing an OK job.

# As my cold, black heart

# Got strangled

# For all of it... #

The final rehearsals for In Parenthesis take place on stage.

The trench is tried out.

Are we ready?

Military protocol is checked.

During the First World War, British soldiers were not allowed

-to wear beards.

-Men, stand closer to the razor.

# I want the stars to play with... #

Lighting effects are devised.

It's good.

# And talk of Welshmen... #

Well, ladies, this looks pretty extraordinary.

And costumes are tested on stage.

So we think, ladies, we'll do this section without the gloves,

without the fingers.

In Parenthesis the opera is the right work

at absolutely the right moment

because a national opera company has a cultural obligation to the people

from which it has grown.

I think the plus points for the company

are not to do with making money

or having a great hit on their hands.

They're in a way more profound and deeper.

I think we're out of time.

Thank you very much indeed, everybody, well done.

We're doing what an opera company should be doing,

which is to produce highly intelligent, interesting...

..material based around the literature of our country

and history of our country, and making a beautiful artwork

in response to those ingredients.

# This one night transforms the endless dark

# I would hasten to my cold, black love

# I would breathe more freely for a grim embrace

# As my cold, black heart

# Got strangled

# For all of it

# In this dark night

# There is a kind of blessedness

APPLAUSE

Thank you so much.