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‘JUST A WORD ON A STAVE AND THERE IS THE OPERA’: THE INTERACTION BETWEEN MUSIC AND LIBRETTO IN PHILIP VENABLES’ 4.48 PSYCHOSIS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 October 2021
Abstract
The success of Philip Venables’ opera adaptation of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis is underpinned by its powerful presentation of the play's text. This is predominantly facilitated by the other musical forces present, rather than through clever text-setting alone. Venables uses an array of timbral techniques, theatrical performance directions, referential sound effects, interactions with literary devices in the text and allusions to other musical genres in the opera to support and supplement his vocal writing. This article argues that the instrumental composition in 4.48 is critical in ensuring comprehension of the libretto and that, because of his working methods, Venables’ adaptation is faithful to Kane's sensitive play.
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References
1 Saunders, Graham, ‘Love Me or Kill Me’: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (Manchester: Manchester Unversity Press, 2002), p. 153Google ScholarPubMed.
2 Saunders, Graham, About Kane: The Playwright and the Work (London: Faber & Faber Ltd, 2009), p. 81Google Scholar.
3 Philip Venables, ‘4.48 Psychosis: Opera as Music and Text’ (Guildhall School of Music & Drama, 2017), https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/19415/ (accessed 10 January 2019).
4 George Hall, ‘4.48 Psychosis Review at Lyric Hammersmith – “Startling and Immensely Moving”’, Stage, 25 May 2016, www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/2016/4-48-psychosis-review-lyric-hammersmith-startling-immensely-moving/ (accessed 18 May 2019).
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7 Gareth Evans, The Composer as Auteur: Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis as an Opera (unpublished, 2016), p. 4, http://448psychosis.philipvenables.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/The-Composter-as-Auteur-4.48-Psychosis-as-Opera.pdf (accessed 13 May 2019).
8 Alicia Tycer, ‘“Victim. Perpetrator. Bystander”: Melancholic Witnessing of Sarah Kane's “4.48 Psychosis”’, Theatre Journal, 60, no. 1 (2008), p. 29.
9 Venables, ‘4.48 Psychosis: Opera as Music and Text’, p. 17.
10 Ibid., p. 12.
11 Sarah Kane, Sarah Kane: Complete Plays (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2001), xvii.
12 Michael Billington, ‘How Do You Judge a 75-Minute Suicide Note?’, Guardian, 30 June 2000, www.theguardian.com/stage/2000/jun/30/theatre.artsfeatures (accessed 26 April 2019).
13 Cristina Delgado-García, ‘Sing without Hope, Tender with Trust’, in 4.48 Psychosis Programme (London: Royal Opera House, 2016), p. 6, http://448psychosis.philipvenables.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/A-new-kind-of-opera.pdf (accessed 18 May 2019).
14 Additionally, as the main character's content and tone is varied, it is impossible to distinguish Kane's authorial voice, as is often found in her other works, from the one that pervades within 4.48. (Ehren Fordyce, ‘The Voice of Kane’, in Sarah Kane in Context, eds Laurens De Vos and Graham Saunders (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), p. 104.)
15 Venables, ‘4.48 Psychosis: Opera as Music and Text’, p. 4.
16 Saunders, About Kane, p. 88.
17 Philip Venables, ‘4.48 Psychosis Scene Plan’ (2015), http://448psychosis.philipvenables.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/4.48-Scene-plan-copy.png (accessed 10 January 2019).
18 Philip Venables, 4.48 Psychosis: A Chamber Opera in One Act after Sarah Kane (Full Score), 2nd edn (London: G. Ricordi & Co. Ltd, 2018).
19 Philip Venables, 4.48 Psychosis, Royal Opera (Lyric Hammersmith, London, 4 May 2018), video recording (unpublished, 2018). The revival had the same orchestra, staging, venue, core creative team and three of the same cast as the original 2016 production. As such, its recording of the opera is definitive and can be considered a primary source.
20 Denis Smalley, ‘Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes’, Organised Sound, 2, no. 2 (1997), pp. 112–13.
21 Dan Rebellato, ‘Sarah Kane Interview – 3 November 1998’, Dan Rebellato, www.danrebellato.co.uk/sarah-kane-interview (accessed 1 June 2019).
22 Venables, ‘4.48 Psychosis: Opera as Music and Text’, p. 48.
23 Philip Venables, Illusions (Full Score) (London: G. Ricordi & Co. Ltd, 2017).
24 Peter F. Stacey, ‘Towards the Analysis of the Relationship of Music and Text in Contemporary Composition’, Contemporary Music Review, 5, no. 1 (1989), p. 19.
25 Venables, ‘4.48 Psychosis: Opera as Music and Text’, p. 41.
26 Venables does emphasise certain lines of the text within Scenes 3 and 22, but there are too many examples to address in detail. One notable instance occurs at 22C, where he places two large orchestral swells in quick succession to reflect the half-rhyme and repetition within the lines ‘to avoid pain / to avoid shame’.
27 Philip Venables, ‘Working Diagram 1’ (2015), http://448psychosis.philipvenables.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IMG_2092.jpg (accessed 10 January 2019).
28 Saunders, ‘Love Me or Kill Me’, p. 147.
29 Venables, ‘4.48 Psychosis: Opera as Music and Text’, p. 58.
30 Ibid., p. 60.
31 Evans, The Composer as Auteur, p. 5.
32 Aiyun Huang, ‘Percussion Theater: The Drama of Performance’, in The Cambridge Companion to Percussion, ed. Russell Hartenberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 128.
33 Venables, ‘4.48 Psychosis: Opera as Music and Text’, p. 59.
34 In her penultimate play, Crave, Kane reversed this process. She said that ‘I knew what the rhythm was, but I did not know what I was going to say. There were a couple of times I used musical notation – only the rhythm without actual words’ (Saunders, About Kane, p. 94). Kane's experiments with form from Cleansed to Crave to 4.48 have been observed by many literary scholars, and, while Kane never spoke publicly about her methods for creating 4.48, it is likely that she continued to exchange natural prosody for musical metricality.
35 Venables, ‘4.48 Psychosis: Opera as Music and Text’, p. 65.
36 Ibid., p. 62.
37 Levack Drever, quoted in Ross Brown, Sound: A Reader in Theatre Practice (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 200.
38 Ibid., p. 152.
39 Ciarán O'Keeffe and Sarah Angliss, ‘The Subjective Effects of Infrasound in a Live Concert Setting’, in CIM04: Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology (Graz: Graz University Press, 2004), p. 132, https://static.uni-graz.at/fileadmin/_Persoenliche_Webseite/parncutt_richard/Pdfs/PaKeZi04_CimAbstracts.pdf (accessed 13 May 2019).
40 Kane, Sarah Kane: Complete Plays, p. 214.
41 Venables, 4.48 Psychosis: A Chamber Opera in One Act after Sarah Kane (Full Score), p. x.
42 Saunders, About Kane, p. 60.
43 Ibid., p. 98.
44 Michael Searby, ‘Ligeti's “Le Grand Macabre”: How He Solved the Problem of Writing a Modernist Opera’, Tempo, 66, no. 262 (2012), p. 33.
45 Saunders, ‘Love Me or Kill Me’, p. 174.
46 Ibid., p. 124.
47 Reginald Smith Brindle, Contemporary Percussion (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 177. A slow roll played on a tight snare drum occurs as the air-raid siren is getting up to speed. It climaxes at bar 86, where Lucy (the cast member representing the on-stage Doctor throughout the opera) sings the line ‘cease this war’ as a separate force from the rest of the cast, and enhances the evocation of war.
48 Huang, ‘Percussion Theater’, p. 185.
49 Venables applies this technique again at bars 64–65 over many identical glitching repetitions of the line ‘the same’, which is both effective and amusingly self-referential.
50 The contrabass gesture also draws the listener's attention to a micro rule of three that Venables has hidden within the larger one; he passes ‘Who lied’ through the two solo voice parts before arriving at the significantly louder chorus statement of the full line.
51 Robert S. Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 2.
52 Bella Brover-Lubovsky, Tonal Space in the Music of Antonio Vivaldi (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 151–52.
53 Venables, 4.48 Psychosis: A Chamber Opera in One Act after Sarah Kane (Full Score), p. x.
54 Ibid., p. 84. In his review of the opera, Rutherford-Johnson describes the effectiveness of Venables’ ‘Purcellian lament’. See Rutherford-Johnson, Tim, ‘Philip Venables 4.48 Psychosis, Royal Opera House at Lyric Hammersmith, London; Liza Lim Tree of Codes, Musikfabrik, Cologne Opera, Cologne’, Tempo 70, no. 278 (2016), p. 91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the score's first edition, Venables describes ‘Clare's Song’ as a ‘baroque aria’, whereas in the second edition, published in 2018, after the review, he replaces ‘baroque’ with ‘Purcellian’. While there is no definite evidence that this change was made in response to Rutherford-Johnson's review, it is significant that Venables chose to focus his stylistic reference.
55 Dido's lament is the final aria in Purcell's opera and bears an interesting similarity to Gwen's final moments in 4.48: both Dido and Gwen are about to die, and both scenes share the same tonality, G minor.
56 Hatten, Robert S., ‘Four Semiotic Approaches to Musical Meaning: Markedness, Topics, Tropes, and Gesture’, Musicological Annual, 41, no. 1 (2005), p. 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
57 Evans, The Composer as Auteur, p. 4.
58 Venables, ‘4.48 Psychosis: Opera as Music and Text’, p. 38.
59 Kane, Sarah Kane: Complete Plays, p. 119.
60 Ibid., p. 136.
61 Ibid., p. 39.
62 Ibid., p. 129.
63 Ibid., pp. 218–19.
64 Walsh, Fintan, Theatre and Therapy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.