Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Benjamin: Lessons in Love and Violence; Spears: Paul's Case

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Both of the twenty-first century operas featured today have a gay sensibility. Both of them show us the life and death of a gay male in a time long ago when homosexuality was taboo in Western Christian society. It's only been in the past generation or two in the later twentieth century that such stories can be told in operatic terms in a sympathetic way. So the theme of today's programming could be stated as "death in the closet."

The Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe did indeed deal with the character of a fourteenth-century "gay" monarch in his play The troublesome reign and lamentable death of Edward the second King of England, with the tragical fall of proud Mortimer (1594). The British team of composer George Benjamin (b. 1960) and librettist Martin Crimp (b. 1956) came up with a contemporary take on King Edward and Earl Roger de Mortimer in their third operatic collaboration, Lessons in Love and Violence, which premiered at Covent Garden in May of 2018. It's an operatic tragedy, to be sure, and Edward ends up dead, but he isn't tortured to death in the horrible way the gay king is in Marlowe's original play. It is Mortimer, who wanted to separate the king from his male lover Piers Gaveston and who wanted Edward dead and deposed, who gets executed. Following closely on the Covent Garden production, Lessons in Love and Violence was staged again by Dutch National Opera at the Holland Festival in the Summer of 2018. The opera was commissioned by an international group of famous opera houses headed by the Royal Opera of London. Benjamin and Crimp's Lessons in Love and Violence was recorded at the Holland Festival and issued through the Nimbus record label of the UK in 2019 on two compact discs.

American novelist Willa Cather (1876-1947) was a lesbian who wrote perceptively about gay men in her closeted bygone era. Her story "Paul's Case" was first published in McClure's magazine, of which she was editor, in 1905. Paul is a rebellious aesthete of a youth. Today we might think of him as stereotypically queer. He breaks away from his stifling homelife in Pittsburgh for freedom in New York City. But this brief escapade ends tragically in Paul's suicide. An American composer of our time, Gregory Spears (b. 1977) has made Paul's Case into an opera. He worked up a libretto for himself with major input from playwright Kathryn Walat. With the backing of American Opera Projects, Paul's Case was first staged by Urbanarias, conducted by Robert Wood. In 2018 it was recorded in the recital hall of the Performing Arts Center at the State University of New York's Purchase College. Again Robert Wood was conducting the vocal team of Urbanarias and the American Modern Ensemble chamber players. A National Sawdust release on two silver discs.