Peter Maxwell Davies’ The Lighthouse
Sung in English
New Opera Annex production
February 8, 9, 11, 12m, 2012
at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum
One Columbia Point, Boston
Evening performances begin at 8pm. The Sunday matinee (m) begins at 5pm.
Music and libretto by Peter Maxwell Davies
A dark storm rages … a mysteriously deserted lighthouse. A court of inquiry into the unnatural disappearance of three keepers. The only remaining living beings … a swarm of black rats. The table carefully set … all neat and orderly … nothing amiss except a chair lying on its back and a broken teacup. Verdict: death by misadventure. The truth?
Peter Maxwell Davies’ opera is an unforgettably gripping and overwhelming portrait of growing madness and possession. A chamber orchestra and Davies’ own compelling and mysteriously deep libretto, conjure up an isolated world, terrifying and moving.
Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes. No intermission.
| Conductor | DAVID ANGUS |
| Stage Director | TIM ALBERY* |
| Set and Costume Designer | CAMELLIA KOO* |
| Lighting Designer | THOMAS C. HASE |
| Sandy / Officer 1, tenor | JOHN BELLEMER |
| Blazes / Officer 2, baritone | CHRISTOPHER BURCHETT* |
| Arthur / Voice of the Cards / Officer 3, bass |
DAVID CUSHING |
Chamber Ensemble from the Boston Lyric Opera Orchestra
*BLO Debut
PROLOGUE – Court of Inquiry
The Court of Inquiry in Edinburgh is investigating the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers. The three protagonists play the parts of the three officers of the lighthouse ship, the action moving between the courtroom, the ship, and the lighthouse itself. The inquiry is conducted by the horn of the orchestra, whose wordless questions the protagonists answer – making the questions clear in retrospect. Gradually they move from straight testimony into fantastical imaginings of evil during a “flashback” to the lighthouse, but then we snap back to the courtroom. The Court reaches an open verdict. At the end of the Prologue the three officers tell us that the lighthouse is now automatic and the building abandoned and sealed up, while the lighthouse itself flashes its automatic signal to a rhythm which is reflected in the orchestra.
ACT – The Cry of the Beast
The single act bears the subtitle The Cry of the Beast. The three singers from the Prologue become the vanished keepers. The scene is set inside the lighthouse with the three keepers at the table in a state of edginess with each other. Arthur is a bible-thumping religious zealot, constantly at loggerheads with Blazes who has no truck with his hypocrisy; the third keeper, Sandy, tries peace-keeping moves to keep them apart. When Arthur leaves the table and goes aloft to light the lantern,Sandy and Blazes have a game of crib. They quarrel over this, and when Arthur returns, the atmosphere becomes extremely tense.Sandy suggests that Blazes should sing a cheerful song to help break this tension. Blazes obliges, followed by Sandy and Arthur.
Each song, though light and superficial on the surface, might be taken as an indication of the inner character and history of the singers. Blazes sings a rough ballad, accompanied by violin and banjo, about an adolescent’s career of crime in city slums leading to murder and the death of his parents. Sandy sings a love song, with cello and out-of-tune piano, which when taken up and accompanied by the other two keepers, takes on a new meaning—suggesting that his love-life was not as innocent as it might have appeared. Arthur sings a holy-roller, rabblerousing ditty, with brass and clarinet, about God’s revenge on the Children of Israel for worshipping the Golden Calf—projecting his own suppressed aggression into God’s will and biblical history.
The atmosphere turns chilly—fog swirls about the lighthouse and Arthur starts the foghorn with the words “the cry of the Beast across the sleeping world—one night that cry will be answered from the deep.”
From the mists, ghosts from the past of the three keepers emerge to take their revenge—ghosts that might be directly out of the songs each keeper sang if these were indeed personal revelations. These ghosts cannot be seen, butSandyand Blazes convince themselves that they are visible, driving themselves into a state of such guilty desperation that they become crazed. The ghosts call upon Blazes andSandyto go out with them into the night.
When Arthur returns from the lightroom, he is convinced that the Beast has called across the sea—the Golden Calf has come to claim his servants. The eyes of the Beast are seen to approach, eventually becoming an all-blinding dazzle. Calling upon God’s help, bellowing a hymn, the three keepers move out to defend themselves against this spirit, which they now see as the Antichrist.
At the climax of the storm and the brightest point of the light from the eyes of the Beast, the keepers are replaced by the three officers from the lighthouse ship (played by the same three singers), and the light of the approaching Beast is seen to perhaps have been the light of the lighthouse ship.
From the remarks of the ship’s officers, the exact nature of the lighthouse keepers’ disappearance is open to interpretation. Indeed, are the officers themselves trying to deny some truth that they fear? Or are they trying to cover something up perhaps?
When the relief keepers enter the lighthouse, although they cannot be seen very clearly, it is more than possible that they are the same three we saw earlier in the act. As the lighthouse is seen to flash its automatic signal, there is the further possibility that we have been watching a play of ghosts in a lighthouse abandoned and boarded up for eighty years.
Written by Peter Maxwell Davies
Watch two members of the BLO orchestra play 7 minutes of The Lighthouse reduced to 60 seconds.
BLO Music Director interviews Peter Maxwell Davies, composer of The Lighthouse
In depth details about the opera.
Stills and show reel of The Lighthouse.
Featuring Andrew Slater, Paul Carey Jones and Sean Clayton. International Arts Festival, Montepulciano 2007. Designed by Jon Bausor with lighting by Paul Keogan.
WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN (A LITTLE BACKGROUND)
BIOGRAPHY OF SIR PETER MAXWELL DAVIES
Over the course of his career, Maxwell Davies’s status has changed from enfant terrible to leading cultural figure at the heart of the British establishment. His appointment in 2004 as Master of the Queen’s Music is a tribute to the revolutionary influence he has had on the British contemporary music scene and the public’s perception of it. From his radical works of the 1960’s, he has developed a more conventional, but no less startlingly original, idiom often drawing on the music and landscape of the Orkney Islands where he has lived since 1971. MORE>
COMPOSER’S NOTE
In December 1900 the lighthouse supply ship Hesperus, based in Stromness, Orkney, went on its routine tour of duty to the FIannan Isles in the Outer Hebrides. The lighthouse was empty – all three beds and the table looked as if they had been left in a hurry and the lamp, though out, was in perfect working order, but the men had disappeared into thin air. MORE>
Berkshire Arts Review: The Lighthouse
The Financial Times: The Lighthouse, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston
The Hub Review: Boston Lyric Opera lights up The Lighthouse
The Hub Review calls ‘The Lighthouse’ the “do-not-miss” arts events of the weekend
The New York Times: Did They Crumble Into Thin Air? Only the Fog Could Tell
The Boston Phoenix: BLO illuminates Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse
The Boston Musical Intelligencer: BLO’s Lighthouse Lulls and Bewitches
Boston Classical Review: BLO serves Maxwell Davies well with a haunting and effective “Lighthouse”
The Boston Globe: BLO keeps a light on for the less traditional
BLO to shine a light on Maxwell Davies opera
The Boston Globe: Boston Lyric Opera brings ‘The Lighthouse’ to JFK
