Peter Sculthorpe by Graeme Skinner

Author:Graeme Skinner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
Published: 2015-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Always austere, Australian (1965)

Well before the start of the year, Sydney ISCM had chosen four works to submit to its Madrid international festival in May 1965, including Butterley’s Laudes, and, evidently unconcerned that it might be taken amiss in official quarters in Franco’s Spain, Meale’s Lorca Homage. Staking claim to a more national focus than previously, the committee also sent a Quintet by Melbourne composer George Tibbitts, and the Fibonacci Variations by Brisbane’s Colin Brumby.1 The fifth space had been reserved for the new Sculthorpe quartet, but it was not ready in time, and The Loneliness of Bunjil was sent instead. The Madrid jury did not take up the ten-year-old work, however, and yet again there was no Sculthorpe at an ISCM festival. Sculthorpe anyway received his first Spanish performance that year, when the London Czech Trio revived Irkanda III in Barcelona on 9 February. La Prensa greeted the chance to hear the work of any Australian composer as ‘most interesting’, and thought the work combined ‘primeval ruggedness … and a primitive, rough, strong poetry which does not exclude delicacy and tenderness in certain passages’ and ‘deserved the warm approval shown by the audience’. Vanguardia called it ‘acute and cleverly developed’. Only the Diario de Barcelona demurred, describing ‘an example of concrete-music [which] though pretending at some moments to lyricism, relentlessly tortured us by mechanical progressions and manufactured dissonances without control. Is this called a work of music?’2

The opera project limped on through the summer. White reported to Nolan early in November 1964 on Peter’s first visit to Martin Road: ‘He came here the other night amiable as ever, but I can’t come any closer to feeling that he would be right for our particular work’.3 Peter’s next recorded visit was almost two months later, on 23 January, when again there were heated words. White wrote to him next morning:

I feel I must put down coolly what I expressed badly last night. There are various reasons why I don’t want to do this opera. In the first place, when you had the synopsis, it was clear you did not understand the character of Mrs Fraser. Since then I have seen enough of you to know that you would never understand her in the way I do … I believe also we should be temperamentally unsuited as collaborators.

Concerned that Haag had still not come up with a contract, or even a firm fee offer, White now stressed: ‘I would never have undertaken to write a libretto without a written agreement approved by my agent, and some money’. And now that he had more important non-theatrical projects to hand, he excused himself on a still conciliatory note:

I hope you find a satisfactory librettist … I assure you I don’t intend to collaborate with anyone else in a Mrs Fraser opera, or in any opera. (Mrs F is anybody’s property, of course.) I don’t want to contribute anything further to the theatre, enough I should like to see my existing plays performed

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