For You by Ian McEwan: Oxford Playhouse (From The Oxford Times)

For You by Ian McEwan: Oxford Playhouse

5:20am Thursday 9th July 2009 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
• Comments(0)

Charles Frieth is a pre-eminent composer, conductor, and prodigious womaniser. He expects his orchestral players to do what they’re told — and that includes jumping into bed with him the minute a rehearsal or concert is over, should he so decide.

He is oblivious to the turmoil his behaviour inflicts on those around him.

Similar, real-life, maestri may well have existed down the years, but Charles himself comes from the imagination of award-winning novelist Ian McEwan, whose books include Atonement and On Chesil Beach among many others. Charles is the central character in a new opera, For You, which McEwan has written (it’s his first opera libretto) in conjunction with composer and Radio 3 presenter Michael Berkeley.

“It came about through discussions we had centred on the notion that sexual obsession would be a good engine to drive an opera,” Ian McEwan told me when we met during rehearsals.

“Michael and I took some long walks in the Chilterns, and I came up with some basic ideas. Michael liked them, so we started work — in a rather curious way actually: I would write a scene, send it off to Michael, and he would start to set it. Meanwhile, I would go back to writing the novel I was working on at the time, which was On Chesil Beach.

“Then, sensing the Michael was snapping at my heels, I would send off another scene.”

For You was commissioned by Music Theatre Wales, a much smaller compatriot of Welsh National Opera.

Rather symbolically, when I visited it was being prepared in an outlying Cardiff rehearsal hall, tacked on to WNO’s scenery-building department.

Also symbolically, Ian McEwan and I were talking about the birth of this brand-new opera in a WNO storage room, which was stuffed with dusty relics of the past — programmes for old WNO productions were stacked all around us.

The surroundings were an apt reminder that For You is an opera about professional musicians, for professional musicians to perform.

I asked McEwan what particularly attracted him to this idea.

“I quite like the circularity of it. I suppose in my fiction I enjoy playing with, and crossing the boundaries of, a recognisable, actual world, and an invented one. So, right from the beginning, we establish a convention of a baritone conducting the pit orchestra, and then meditating and reflecting on his own music.

“I also wanted to reflect on the way in which the creative artist is not to be bound by the rules that bind ordinary people — a view that is still amazingly widespread, and completely bankrupt!

“Two rehearsals rather bookend the whole opera, one at each end. Being rehearsed is Charles Frieth’s demonic Aubade, which is crucial to his sense of self — this rather overweening, overreaching figure, who has a somewhat inflated notion of his own powers, even though he really is a bit of a poseur.”

The Aubade is the work Charles has aspired to all his life.

It’s to be his artistic zenith, and is also intended to prove that he can still hack it — perhaps not entirely unlike the idea behind the late Michael Jackson’s proposed, and ill-fated concerts at the O2 Arena.

“Charles is a good musician, and a very eminent composer,” McEwan explained.

“There’s nothing second-rate about his Aubade. Michael Berkeley and I talked about this a lot, we certainly didn’t want to end the opera with 15 minutes of pastiche. Michael really had to rise to this.

“So even though the words have a touch of mockery about them — that Charles could ‘outstare the sun’ in his creative overreach, for instance — it did very much demand that Michael came up with the goods.

“I am glad to say that he did this!”

Ian McEwan’s storyline means that Michael Berkeley has had to produce a score that encompasses a whole range of emotions, going all the way from lyrical to the tragic.

“Everyone from Mozart to Puccini has done it,” Berkeley reminded me.

“The great thing about music is that you can flick almost in just a moment from something that is very funny to something that is tragic.

“So, for example, when Maria [the scheming housekeeper] breaks in on Charles and the young horn player at the vital moment when they try to achieve sexual fulfilment, she comes in with a tray full of food.

“It’s a ludicrous moment, and yet she comes in on a top A, at the climax of the sexual thing!

“I hope that’s very funny.

“But it very quickly turns again — almost Rossini-like — every time that Charles and this young horn player Joan are about to get it together, someone else comes in and ruins it.

“Every art form is more powerful for having both light and shade.

“I think one of my challenges with this libretto was to make us care about the characters, through the music.

“A libretto needs to be a poor thing in itself, in order to leave the music something to do.

“I think that Ian really grasped that, leaving me to imbue the characters with something that we find lovable, and can sympathise with — even in the case of Charles, whose behaviour is appalling by most standards.”

lFor You is at the Oxford Playhouse on Saturday, July 11. Tickets are available from 01865 305305 or online at oxfordplayhouse.com