The Voice That Thunders by Alan Garner

Author:Alan Garner [Alan Garner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

1 This lecture was delivered at The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, on the theme of “Science Fiction at Large”, on 26 February 1975.

8

Potter Thompson

POTTER THOMPSON LASTS for ninety minutes in performance, and took seventeen years to prepare. I cannot say whether it is normal for a librettist to conceive and structure an opera, because I am musically illiterate. I know none of the technicalities. A score is a pattern, and C sharp or B flat are meaningless. Yet Gordon Crosse asked me to write for him, and Potter Thompson is the result.1

The seventeen years of preparation were spent in my learning something of the difficulties of language, and produced five novels and a Nativity play. By the time the fifth novel had developed, I knew that I had reached a point where the words were picked clean. I was at the bone. To have gone further would have been to snap syntax and to be in danger of writing a blank page. The next words would have to be inflected: they needed to be sung.

Crosse must have sensed this development before he wrote to me. We met, and he told me that the Finchley Group wanted to commission an opera, and that he hoped that Michael Elliott would direct it. For me, this triangular relationship has been an extraordinary period, after the essentially isolated time as a novelist. Director, composer and librettist were working together even before a theme for the opera had been chosen.

None of the three of us believes that much good can come of writing by committee, and Potter Thompson was not written in that way; but there was a collaborative aspect.

The best image I can think of is the three overlapping circles of the ATV testcard. Each is itself, different from the others, but, where they overlap, the colours fuse to white. That, metaphorically, is the area of collaboration, and it was my job to find it.

There were requirements dictated by the nature of the commission: professional standards, based on children’s performances. We agreed that the piece should be immediately exciting, without loss of subtlety. I felt that a mythological root was needed, and I remember churning out myth after myth, while my collaborators shook their heads in a sustained display of non-collaboration. I was looking for the white overlap, and I was not succeeding.

Then I suggested the myth of the Sleeping Hero, a prime myth of Britain. My childhood had been spent on one of the sites of its manifestation, and it had generated my first book. It ought to have been my first thought for the opera, because, as soon as I mentioned it, we had our common ground.

The myth takes several forms, but the central story is of the man who finds the Hero asleep under a hill, starts to wake him, but stops short of the final ritual act. Our common ground was a curiosity to discover why the mortal refuses the immortal. Why does Potter Thompson not bring the shining Hero out of the hill?

To précis a work is to diminish it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.