Benjamin - Picture a day like this, at the Opéra Comique in Paris

Opéra Comique, Paris, Wednesday October 30 2024

An edited version of this post will be published on Parterre.com

Conductor: George Benjamin. Production, sets and lighting: Marie-Christine Soma, Daniel Jeanneteau. Costumes: Marie La Rocca. Videos: Hicham Berrada. Woman: Marianne Crebassa. Zabelle: Anna Prohaska. Lover 1/Composer: Beate Mordal. Lover 2/Composer's assistant: Cameron Shahbazi. Artisan/collector: John Brancy. Actors: Matthieu Baquey, Lisa Grandmottet, Eulalie Rambaud. Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France.

Photos: © Jean-Louis Fernandez

My first opera of the new season in Paris, after kicking off in Brussels with Kris Defoort’s thought-provoking The Day of our Singing, was another nearly-new work, totally new to me: Sir George Benjamin’s Picture a day like this. Like Benjamin’s much-admired Written on Skin, The Day of our Singing has (like all his operas, in fact) a libretto by Martin Crimp, was first performed at the Aix Festival (in this case in 2023), and has now had its Paris premiere at the Opéra Comique, under Sir George himself. In all, seven houses co-commissioned and are co-producing this piece, and it has already travelled to Aix, London and Strasbourg. But as, for most people reading this post, it’s likely to be new, I'll include an outline of the story and some words about the score that anyone already familiar with them can simply skip.

Martin Crimp has called the opera ‘a kind of Alice in Wonderland, but for adults’. It certainly involves a quest, in seven brief scenes - the work totals no more than 75 minutes, without a break - but what seemed more obvious to me than Alice, as I watched, was its roots in oriental myths, legends and fairy tales. Without directly imitating oriental verse, the poetic libretto is dotted with allusions to it, from the very first scene:

In the first garden ran four streams

Of life. Quince, almond, lilac, violet

Flowered. In the deep shade of the Cypress tree

No one felt pain: there was no death.

The writing brings to mind oriental painting - ‘miniatures’ (to use a term dismissed by specialists as a western misrepresentation). Indeed, the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s critic referred, in 2023, to ‘this taut, sharp miniature,’ (which, he pursued, proved that Benjamin is ‘the finest opera composer of today…a work of depth of feeling, humanistic artistry and expressive rigour…a drama that is miraculously condensed’).

The plot is simple enough. A woman’s infant dies, but, in Scene 1, she is told:

Find one happy person in this world

And cut one button from their sleeve.

Do it before night

And your child will live.

On a dark stage, surrounded only by semi-reflective panels, she is given an itinerary on a sheet of paper, and sets off on her quest, through a series of encounters involving hopes raised and dashed, recalling Judith opening the doors in Bluebeard’s castle.

She begins by apologetically interrupting the coitus of two cute, smiling lovers, writhing half-dressed on a mattress - here, less messily, a light-box brought to centre-stage by actors in cassocks and boots. They seem happy, but soon fall out over the man’s polyamorous affairs - with either sex or any ‘in between.’ Next, the actor-stagehands wheel in a kind of museum vitrine, in which sits the Artisan, in a blue suit encrusted with glistening buttons, cradling a fading bouquet. He can enumerate every beautiful button he has made. But he soon starts to rave, revealing his failure and the scars of self-mutilation.

She moves on, and meets a world-famous composer, in a gabardine, with her smarmy assistant in a sharp suit, no socks in his dress shoes, phone to his ear, scuttling busily along a moving walkway. The composer, immensely rich and famous (Crimp’s text is not without dark humour), should be happy. But when the Woman mentions this to her, the walkway stops dead. The composer is burnt out; her life is empty.

The Woman pauses, now alone, to sing a searing aria, the emotional core of the work, expressing her frustration with fate. ‘Dead stems of flowers come to life again.’ Why not her son? Then, in scene six, on a stage now filled with a maze of framed translucent screens, she meets the Collector, his camel coat slung over the shoulders of a dapper suit, who owns ‘rooms full of miracles,’ including a Matisse. But money can’t buy him the love he longs for. Moved nonetheless by her grief, he leads her to Zabelle’s garden, represented by the projection, on a scrim, of a luxurious, Ernst-like garden of (toxic?) chemicals sprouting profusely in water.

When she begs to share Zabelle’s happiness, Zabelle tells her story: ‘Picture a day like this…’, which grimly mirrors the Woman’s and ends, enigmatically, ‘I am happy, but only because I don’t exist.’ The Woman, at the end of her voyage through bereavement, the stages of grief, hope and disillusion, now has a tiny button in her hand. But what does it mean?

The almost clinical directing avoids too-obvious pathos, making the central Aria all the more striking. The acting is crisp and fresh, and though the successive vignettes leave little time for character development, it manages to achieve it, in particular through subtle, changing facial expressions and eye movements that reminded me of Bob Wilson’s work. I was glad to be near the front., as this detail must have been lost on people sitting farther away. In motion, for example, Cameron Shahbazi’s face is fascinating, as anyone interested can see by visiting his Instagram account.

Once, nearly twenty years ago, I likened the arias strung together in a Händel opera to the collection of precious objets d’art in the Galerie d’Apollon at the Louvre. ‘Each one is different, they are all very precious, and each is its own perfect little world.’ I was reminded of that by George Benjamin’s score. It calls for about twenty musicians, but considerably more instruments: the wind players, for example, switch to basset horn, tenor and bass recorders, bass flute, bass and contrabass clarinet, and contrabassoon. These low, velvety sounds contrast with the sparkle of piccolo and piccolo trumpet, whip-cracks, cymbals and bells, harp and celeste. Like those objets d’art, the music is exquisitely crafted, ‘gold and silver, porphyry, jade, rock crystal, lapis lazuli and more’ as I wrote two decades back, ‘expertly and imaginatively wrought into a coherent, deeply satisfying form.’ And, also like Händel’s, Benjamin’s music cleaves ingeniously to the text, sometimes, despite the sad subject-matter, wittily underscoring the character’s failings and disappointments.

The Paris cast sing as if the parts had been written expressly to suit their voices. Which they had, as (apart from the orchestra) this run reunited, under the composer’s sure han, the original performers, all excellent, from the Aix premiere. Beate Mordal’s bright, crisp lyric soprano interacted nicely with Cameron Shahbazi’s grainier, more insinuating sound, just right for those ‘bad-boy’ baroque parts like Tolomeo, which he sings. John Brancy offers a firm, clear baritone and a handsome, engaging presence. Anna Prohaska’s multi-hued soprano contrasts well with Marianne Crebassa’s stoic straightforwardness. But Crebassa, on stage from beginning to end, obviously plays the central role, both dramatically and vocally. Her dark, rich, complex timbre, with undertones of old British contraltos, fills the house in a way few voices do. A triumph of contained vehemence.

Picture a day like this is, however, more an opera of ideas and (sometimes wrenching) emotions, than of action. That's one of the reasons I think it’s less likely to be a ‘popular hit’ than Written on Skin, compared to which its ‘fable’ format, its string of brief scenes, is relatively static. Also, while Benjamin’s skilful score glows, glitters, sighs, burbles and occasionally screams, it does so largely at La Fontaine’s ‘allure de sénateur’: a senatorial pace. You get little sense of varying tempo, more of a trance-inducing regularity. Any longer might have been too much.

To cheer us up after this study of bereavement, grief and the elusiveness of happiness, I’ll end with a game. As Picture a day like this lasts little more than an hour, opera houses may want to pair it with another work. The question is, what?