Birtwistle: Gawain

National Review, March 30, 1992 by Herb Greer

NEW OPERA is an important event and should be an enjoyable one. Unfortunately, much contemporary music appears to come from what Shaw called the genuine pulpit conscience. As he put the matter: "It annoys me to see people comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable." The British composer Harrison Birtwistle betrayed just such a conscience on a radio interview, shortly before the premiere of his new opera, Gawain, at London's Royal Opera House. Speaking of his approach to musical theater, he compared it to a game in which "I make up a set of rules, then rub them out, and don't tell you what they are."

The rules in Gawain are not particularly obscure. Birtwistle employs various technical devices (repetition, motifs, cyclical treatment of material, sound effects like blocks to represent the appearance of a horse, even the spacing of notes to-he claims-suggest character); with these he spins out his score and also relates it to abstract concepts, especially Time (it is capitalized like that in the program notes). I do not mean time in the sense of rhythm. Much, indeed most, of the music in Gawain is set like concrete in a rhetorical prose mood which makes any sense of pulse incidental. For about the first ten minutes of the opera, its obsessively dissonant texture, plus violent and crude melodramatic acting, gives off a certain excitement, like the scores of 1960s Hammer horror films. But well before the end of the three-hour opera, the people sitting around me (and they claimed to be fans of Birtwistle's music) were looking furtively at their watches.

The story of Gawain was adapted by the British poet David Harsent from a wonderful fourteenth-century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is gripping, vivid, and beautifully shaped.

Christmas revels at King Arthur's court are interrupted by a mysterious Green Knight who issues a challenge: he offers his great axe to any knight of the Round Table who will strike him one blow; but in a year and a day that man must come to the Green Knight's chapel and accept a similar blow in return. Sir Gawain agrees, and cuts off the Green Knight's head. The body picks up its severed head, reminds Gawain of the bargain, and leaves.

After a year and a winter journey full of adventures, Sir Gawain comes to the castle of Bertilak de Hautdesert, who tells him that the Green Chapel is not far away. Gawain is invited by Bertilak to stay in the castle and keep his wife company while he goes out and hunts. The men make a bargain: Bertilak will give Gawain his trophies from the hunt if Gawain will give him any trophy he wins in the castle.

For three days Bertilak's wife tries to seduce Gawain, but is only able to kiss him. Each night, given first a stag's head, then a boar's head, and finally a fox's tail, Gawain gives Bertilak one, two, and three kisses. But the third time he holds something back. The wife has given him a magic green belt. With this charm, she tells him, "There is no hathel under heven tohewe him that myght." (There is no creature under heaven that can cut him to pieces.)

Wearing the belt, Gawain goes to meet the Green Knight. As agreed, he exposes his neck to a blow from the great axe, flinches once, then holds firm. The Knight strikes, only nicking Gawain, then reveals himself as Bertilak, admitting that he arranged the attempted seduction as a test of Gawain's virtue. The lie about the belt is forgiven because it arose from Gawain's love of his life. Bertilak gives him the belt to wear as a token of the ordeal.

Gawain returns to Arthur's court, bitterly reproaching himself for cowardice. Nevertheless, the court acclaims him and it is agreed that all the knights shall wear a similar belt as a reminder of weakness and sin.

Unfortunately, Harsent and Birtwistle were not satisfied with the story. They tinkered with the characters, changing Arthur from an exuberant strong king into a weakling who runs his court as an "Arthurian clubland" with a xenophobic conspiracy of codes and chivalry and derring-do." The knights of the Round Table are supposed to be beardless boys with nice suits of armor and a tiresome liking for male bonding."

Bertilak is now made to be suspicious and jealous of his wife, and the bargain with Gawain a device to catch her out. The evil Morgan le Fay (who in the poem gives Bertilak his magic powers in the hope that he will destroy Arthur's court) is now good, because the court deserves to be destroyed. When the opera's Gawain returns to the Round Table, he loudly proclaims that he is no hero, rejects Arthur and the court, and so achieves "self-discovery."

One test of an opera and its libretto is to imagine how the effect of performance might change if the words were nonsense syllables. With Gawain the answer is, Not very much. A great deal of Harsent's libretto is simply lost in the jungle of intense dissonance. The orchestral texture of the music does alter from time to time, but the quality and timbre of the dissonance does not. (In a BBC interview, Elgar Howarth, who conducted Gawain, unwarily quoted Birtwistle as admitting: "Oh, well, it's all one chord.") Unlike the work of, say, Alban Berg, which is also dissonant but attractive, the level of intensity is almost completely uniform throughout. The experience is rather like listening to a chorus screech in desperation, severally and together, for three hours.