Thoughts on ‘Picture a Day Like This’ by Opéra Comique de Paris

• 25 October 2024

  Libretto: Martin Crimp
  Score: George Benjamin
  Opéra Comique de Paris

  This work had beauty and craft. It did not move me…

  And, it was another story about a woman written by two men.

  Striking points:

  • no verse/chorus structures

  • no rhyming

  • no ‘songs’

  • there was a beautiful interplay between music and the texts. The instruments painted mood, colours, effects, shapes.- much word-painting, some of it clearly related to text, at other times more obtuse, perhaps a reflection of the composer’s stream of conscious. I liked these ones. The harp playing Matisse green was a favourite moment.

  • motif didn’t matter

  • it was thoroughly through-composed, like a story being read to us, but played and sung instead.

  • it floated largely out of discernible time

  These are all good and timely things to have observed, and helpful.

  Not that I aspire to write a work like this. For one, the libretto I am working with has song structures and rhymes, is inherently rhythmic. I need to work with the structures and language Alana has offered. I am also comfortable with more tonality and more repetition as befits my song writing work. I have seen these traits put to good use in other new opera pieces, and they can work.

  And, I want our work to move people. I strongly believe after everything I’ve seen these last 20 months that opera that fails to move its audience misses the point.

  And I’ve just realised why this one left me cold. It fundamentally missed this point:

  hello! the woman had just LOST HER CHILD. Yet, no scene dealt with that. At no point were we invited to feel that loss, that relationship between mother and child. Instead the story focused on these weird tangential characters and the woman’s quest to find someone who was happy. I didn’t really even understand the ending. Whose button did she find? Was it supposed to be her child’s? I’m guessing so.

  This work had lots to teach me (and remind me) around composition as craft, word painting, orchestration, freedom of the lines. But, I’m afraid for me it didn’t work. It was narrative opera and yet, the story, based in so much vulnerability and sadness, was hugely short-changed.

  In opera, formal innovation is a plus, a bonus, but is not an end in itself. If that comes with emotional resonance you have won.