The Mask of Orpheus, Harrison Birtwistle's fourth work for the lyric stage, is probably the masterpiece of his first maturity. Written in stages from 1973 to 1983, it premiered at the English National Opera in 1986 and then remained unheard until the concert performances that resulted in the present recording. Although most commentators on Birtwistle tend to divide his work into pre-Orpheus and post-Orpheus, I frankly never expected to hear it. The work's reputation for musical, verbal, and theatrical complexity plus the conspicuous lack of revivals, even by the company that commissioned it and successfully produced it, only seemed to increase its forbidding if legendary status. Each of Birtwistle's musical-theater works has taken a different approach to the problems of combining music and drama, although all of them share his fascination with ritual, both theatrical and musical. Each has a different description of its form. The first, Punch and Judy, a tragical comedy or comical tragedy, offered an elaborately ritualized retelling of the children's puppet play, very obviously intended for adults (an excellent recording, originally done by Decca, is available on Etcetera). Of the next two, Bow Down and Down by the Greenwood Side, I know nothing other than their descriptions as "music theater" and "dramatic pastoral" respectively. Following The Mask of Orpheus, designated a lyric tragedy, comes the unrecorded "mechanical pastoral" Yan Tan Tethera and the first work he called an opera, Gawain, recorded by Collins. The most recent work is The Second Mrs. Kong (about the famous monkey's second wife--it's a comedy), which again has not been recorded. Interestingly enough each work has a different librettist, as Birtwistle has sought out collaborators in tune with his preoccupations of the moment.

Before I get into a discussion of the specifics of The Mask of Orpheus (which can be more than a little daunting in description) I should cut to the chase and say that I think the opera is one of the great ones. Whatever their considerable differences in style and technique, the dramatic composers I come back to again and again have a fundamental understanding of how to embody character in music. Birtwistle, who, with his incredibly formal structures has more in common with Mozart, Verdi, and Berg than with Wagner or Monteverdi, has always been a melody-based composer. Once one gets past the occasionally forbidding harmonic structure the music is built entirely on melody. In his operas, the vocal lines sit with remarkable ease on both the voice and the words with none of the chalk-on-blackboard quality that pervades so much 20th-century vocal music (and particularly music setting English words, for some reason). His scoring is always lucid and original. There is a specific dramatic reason for his choice of instrumentation, in the case of The Mask of Orpheus it is an orchestra without strings. I usually find Birtwistle's music appealing on the first hearing and the thirtieth hearing. In The Mask of Orpheus, Birtwistle is very much at his most lyrical, which is appropriate only for an opera about someone who sang so beautifully he could raise the dead. For all the complexity there is an immediate visceral hook that brings the listener back again and again to probe the depths of the music. That is pretty much the definition of a masterpiece in my book.

The Mask of Orpheus operates on several levels. Each of the principal characters appears in three guises. Man/Woman, Hero/Heroine, and Myth, portrayed respectively by an onstage singer, a mime, and a giant singing puppet (the double cast listings in the headnote are for the Man/Woman and Myths). In addition Orpheus appears as Apollo and Hades, Euridice as Persephone, Aristaeus as Charon, and The Oracle of the Dead as Hecate. There is also a singing Troupe of Ceremony that enacts various rituals as part of the main action as well as a mime Troupe of the Passing Clouds that interrupts the action at six points to act out lyrical and violent depictions of death from other myths. The mimes are accompanied by electronic music created by Birtwistle in collaboration with the late Barry Anderson. The general progression is from Man to Myth, but that does not begin to adequately describe the layering of events as the myth is enacted and reenacted from a variety of points of view, often more than one at the same time. In the third act the action becomes so much a religious rite that it is presented simultaneously in English and an invented language created out of the phonemes of "Orpheus" and "Euridice." Structurally, much as Punch and Judy is made from over a hundred individual closed forms, The Mask of Orpheus is divided into 126 discrete events, always grouped in threes and further sorted into recitative and aria. The events sometimes appear layered as many as three deep at any one time. Although this sounds incredibly daunting it really isn't. There is a chart for each of the three acts that shows the structure quite clearly, and in turn this facilitates following Peter Zinovieff's libretto. This is presented in its original guise before the rearrangements made by Birtwistle during composition as well as the abbreviations that were made in the course of preparing the first production. The latter are referred to as cuts in the notes, but since there would be no reason to incorporate such in a concert performance I suspect they are in fact revisions now incorporated in the published score. Since the singers all have remarkably precise and utterly clear diction it is probably more helpful to follow along with the scenario and track list since, like Four Saints in Three Acts and Satyagraha, the action is more or less independent of the actual sung words.

The large cast is beyond praise. One needs to especially note Jon Garrison and Peter Bronder, as Orpheus the man and myth respectively. They both sing with great beauty as well as impeccable diction. They have a great deal of spoken word as well as singing, and each of them manages the spoken portions with such musicality that one barely registers the transitions from speech to song. The recorded sound is remarkably clear, especially given the live circumstances of recording the opera in concert. The integration of the electronic music into the fabric of the stringless orchestra is perfectly handled, and the audience is awesomely quiet. Andrew Davis is a wonderful opera conductor. He handles his massive and diverse forces with great assurance. I heard several of his performances of Mozart at the Chicago Lyric Opera, where he is to take over as music director. Might one hope he will re-create this splendid performance in his new home?

After all this what can I possibly say but go out and buy it?

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