Oedipus/Duke Bluebeard’s Castle1.
Snow.
A double bill of Oedipus Rex by Igor Stravinsky and Duke Bluebeard’s Castle by Béla Bartók was staged by Scottish Opera at the Theatre Royal. This was one of the earlier big cultural events of Glasgow’s year as European City of Culture. Young-Toby wasn’t going to be around for the rest of them.
This was not the first opera I ever attended. That may also have been the English National Opera production of The Love of Three Oranges by Prokofiev, which dated from 1989, and was designed by the Quay Brothers — although I didn’t know that at the time.
Whilst in America, the previous autumn, young-Toby was taken by a family friend to see Mozart’s Idomeneo at San Francisco Opera. As they drove in from Stanford, on a bright evening, they listened to the baseball commentary on the radio. It was the Bay Bridge Series, between Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants, interrupted by the earthquake and eventually won 5-0 by the Athletics.
Young-Toby has been listening to opera since university, where a friend started him off with Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, and he independently plunged into Wagner’s Ring Cycle (as background music to revision, more often than not).
Much later, in 2011, Toby will attend a residency at Snape Maltings, Suffolk, as a librettist. Also there will be composers, directors, musicians, and singers. Together, with the guidance of Stephen Langridge, Stephen Plaice and Harrison Birtwistle, they will spend three weeks, spread out across the year, writing one-minute, then two-minute then ten-minute mini operas. This is the idea of Jonathan Reekie, who’d had enough of sitting through newly commissioned operas by first time librettist and composers with no experience of writing or staging opera.
After this, Toby will write a full-length opera libretto, Vastation, which will be premiered at the Munich Biennal in May 2014 — the music by the Canadian composer, Samy Moussa. It will be sort of revived in 2021 by Opera Labs at Calgary.
Looking back through notebooks from January 1990, I see young-Toby is — for some unknown reason — writing a libretto.
Very like WH Auden in style, he’s bashing out an epithalamium, a wedding song, to be sung as part of a yet-to-be-decided, never-to-be-completed plot.
We really haven’t much to say
upon this happy day
except to bless you, wish you luck
and say we’ll help you if you get stuck.
The married life is often dull
but you are both so full
of life it will not kill you,
it will not dilute but distil you.
Your pasts will no doubt interfere
at moments coming near
to breaking you apart. Do not
try to pretend you haven’t got
a skeleton or two to hide.
We all do, but your pride
must always bow before your love
in this way only will you prove
a lasting, growing partnership
that does not merely loop
itself into repetetivity
but always grows through creativity.
The understanding which you show
in conversation, the glow
upon your faces and the sense
in choosing all of us as friends
continue long into your life
as husband and as wife.
We close the door behind us now
we’re not so gauche as not to know
that friends must sometimes leave alone,
must not visit or phone,
the couple so that they can be
alone in their conviviality.
Young-Toby is lonely.