Rebecca Saunders was always waiting to write an opera. For years, she has been signalling in her titles an attachment to Samuel Beckett (Stirrings Still, That Time), but without setting a word. In 2017, an old fixation on Molly Bloom’s monologue in Ulysses resulted in a work running for almost ninety minutes and inevitably entitled Yes. Then Saunders discovered the writings of Ed Atkins, and in 2021 produced a half-hour concert piece on his “Us Dead Talk Love”, from A Primer for Cadavers (2016). This same text is the source of the opera that has at last arrived: Lash, first performed at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin.
To clarify right away, given that Saunders is a composer who has wrought violence to her highly sophisticated sound-world, the opera’s title refers to its presiding image of an eyelash that has turned up lying under someone’s foreskin. Besides unusual intimacy, the image might evoke disgust, relish or curiosity – or all of these at once. It is hot, as opera needs. Moreover, this same image of the eyelash in the hidden damp strikes at opera’s great themes of death (as a shed eyelash is dead) and sex. Detached from the original monologue, it has found a new home that suits it.
Where Atkins repeatedly invokes the image, Saunders lets it linger, feels for its warmth and its strangeness, brings forward what one might call its harmonics in intimations of back story. The phrase “I wanted to ask” keeps returning, as it does in the Atkins text from which Saunders fashioned her libretto (as she went along, one guesses, impelled by the urgencies of the music). These are four simple words, but the phrase is potent, telling of an inability to utter because now it is too late – an inability to utter, too, even when that would have been possible. So much the greater is its potency when it is delivered by people we can see and hear. At the same time, the phrase does something to recentre the work in an individual consciousness, against its desire to explode.
It disperses most obviously in how we see not one figure on stage, but four: two sopranos (Anna Prohaska and Sarah Maria Sun), a contralto (Noa Frenkel) and an actress (Katja Kolm). Saunders accomplishes the interweaving of sung and spoken with rare panache, eases her way between. Fully engaged performances certainly help, as does close miking that assists the diction. Even so, although Saunders wants us to understand this quartet as a singularity, as four representations of a woman who is “suspended in the aftermath of a death”, that is not what comes across. Four women on stage are four women.
All the more so are two women two. Saunders, as an artist, knows this. In the opera’s most startlingly erotic moment, when it cries out to the whole repertory, the two sopranos join in a love duet, coming together in delirious climax “like”, as they sing here, “two wet gods”. Intensely vivid, the moment is still contained within the music’s swerving subtle texture, which is maintained – and gripping – through an hour and three-quarters. Like operas through the ages, Lash finds a way to give us a thrill. It is the same thrill each time, of passion displaying itself as vocality. But the way always has to be different.
It has to be different, too, from how the original text operated. Atkins’s speaker, probably to be understood as female, is addressing a male lover, and at this point pulls away from rant, snarl and pressing carnality for a few lines of lyrical summoning of a powerful memory. Opera makes that remembered experience happen now. Saunders, whose music has always seized full rights on the present, has no difficulty achieving that. The orchestra conveys the soprano pair to us and supports them in their exultation.
Perhaps more surprising is how Saunders draws on other venerable means for creating drama, whether in gearing up tension by wheeling on bass drums or in having the orchestral music race in circles, all within a thorough musical consistency. With no unfolding narrative, it is the score that has to provide propulsion, as this score does. It may not move forward all the time, as more traditional operatic music does, but it is always on the move. Lash gives the impression of a great container of liquid being manipulated by unseen hands. We feel the liquid’s weight, feel how that weight is constantly on the move, and certainly feel when something spills over or flies up in spray.
What holds us just as much as the compelling movement in the score is the threat. With no story, no Ariadne’s thread, we do not know where or how the work will take us. Its demands on us are those of a lover, offering delight and danger. The connection that must always exist in the theatre, between observer and observed, is raised to become the central relationship. Lash is not about what is happening on stage; it is about what is happening between this whorl of musical-dramatic events and each one of us in the audience. This is exhilarating and scary.
Coming out with its intentions on us by invading our space, the piece falters a little. The first time this happens, with Prohaska and a solo violinist calling out to one another from opposite boxes, the effect is spellbinding. Spells such as this, though, cannot be repeated. Nor has Saunders solved the problem of how to make the occasional presence of instrumentalists on stage – those drummers, two pianists – wholly necessary, acoustically and dramatically. That may be something for her second opera.
Meanwhile, this first unfolds strongly, richly and positively under Enno Poppe, conducting. The production, by the Irish-British company Dead Centre, is smart. Live video (unrelated to Atkins’s work in this sphere) goes without a hitch, though it may not do quite what Saunders hoped. A huge enlargement of an eye does not bring us nearer, but screens us off. Only when the camera delivers up what is operatically vital in the body – the mouth – are we shocked by closeness.
Most extraordinary of all is the ending. The four soloists gather in the middle of the stage and, the great orchestra having settled into silence, sing a song. This is completely simple, in a middle-low register that belongs to all. It is as if the gods have descended to take on humanity – or risen to do so.
Paul Griffiths’s books include Mr. Beethoven, 2020, The Tomb Guardians, 2021, and Let Me Go On, 2023
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