An Operatic Vision Lost in Translation

Jon Fosse wrote Wakefulness, the first part of his eventual Trilogy, in almost one sitting. He has described it as »the projection of a state, a mood, a sound«. Like the two novellas that followed, it is archetype Fosse: built on repetition and suggestion; mingling past, present and future; fragmentary, elliptical and aloof. All are qualities associated more with the music of Bent Sørensen than with that of any other composer alive.

It might be better described as a meditation or a secular oratorio than an opera

Sørensen’s partnering with Fosse, who has crafted his own libretto from Trilogy to frame the composer’s new opera Asle & Alida, should be a creative union made in heaven. It has worked – to a point. But it has also fallen short of what it might have been, both in its failure to access the absolute spirit of Trilogy – what Fosse refers to as »the language behind the words« – and in a staging at the Royal Danish Opera (first seen in Bergen in March) that proves crushingly inept in the face of the material.

Like Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, much of Trilogy resembles a dream – or an extended, disjointed combination of retrospective and consequence. A narrator tries to piece together the scattered fragments of Asle and Alida’s meeting, her pregnancy, their escape from home, their desperate search for somewhere to stay in drizzly Bergen (Bjørgvin in Fosse’s Nynorsk) and their eventual deaths. The pivotal events we do not see; we learn of them through recollection and reportage. Only gradually do we sense the way things actually were: that Asle’s principal solution to their insurmountable problems was, ultimately, murder. Like so much of Fosse’s work, Trilogy charts a steady, inexorable movement through death, towards death. We might only recognise that after the event.

Fragments of beauty, flashes of horror

The opera Asle & Alida is different – it had to be. In the theatre, we hear mostly from the mouths of the protagonists themselves. A chorus is on stage throughout but barely moves. Seated at first, it warms-up Sørensen’s often mercurial score, echoing and percolating in the composer’s singular, hauntingly beautiful manner. Later, the chorus narrates action to striking effect: sometimes it is overlaid by a child’s speaking voice; at one point it relays, in the stark black-and-white of a choral sprechgesang, that Asle had killed Alida’s mother. An on-stage fiddler weaves arpeggios that fleetingly resemble the folk music Asle and his father played on the instrument. 

Sørensen has no problems holding all these shards in the air – floating them on clouds of orchestral sound neither vaporous nor cadaverous. He elevates the text given to him by the Nobel laureate like the finest of opera composers: every word is lucid, given the sonic oxygen and narrative import it needs. Musical characterisation is strong from the moment Asle and Alida trudge onto the stage: his music is lyrical and optimistic; hers neurotic, pained. But Sofia Adrian Jupither’s production has no idea what to do with them, and they are plonked downstage for almost the entirety of the performance. Their tormentors have to travel to them. 

First comes the Old Woman, consumed by her disgust for the pair’s illegitimate pregnancy. Sørensen’s music for her is angular and awry – odd, but at least not caricature. Then comes the Young Woman, a prostitute keen for business from Asle. Her music wants to trace the physiology of a forgotten, demented dance; the vocal lines scream forced confidence, plastic and sickly. This is strong writing from Sørensen.   

His music is most unsettling of all

In Act II – which compresses Fosse’s Olav’s Dream and Weariness into around 40 minutes – the Old Man (who in Trilogy, also turns out to be Asle’s hangman) begins to administer his psychological poison. His music is most unsettling of all. Over stern harmonies in the orchestra, he leaps from bass register to countertenor and back in acts of manipulative physiological contortion that suggest he must only exist in the head. The character of Åsleik, Alida’s temporary saviour, offers redemption by occupying a domain far more real: the role is spoken and sung by an actor with an untrained voice. 

Curiously for a Roman Catholic, Fosse refuses to judge his central characters. He might even root for them. Asle & Alida, unlike Trilogy, doesn’t show us Alida’s eventual suicide after her second life with Åsleik nor the intergenerational, circular trauma that could be said to have caused all the rot in the first place (another Fosse hallmark). Fosse has written that »when things are blackest or darkest, you see the light«. In the programme, Sørensen describes his opera as dealing with the biblical principles of faith, hope and love. 

Both are problematic views of criminal behaviour; little is shown to us to justify Asle’s actions and we witness his flat denial of them. »The music tries to capture the beauty and horror that lies in the struggle for love«, writes Sørensen, but the murder of innocents in the pursuit of happiness is far from endearing. 

For a theatre piece, drama is also in frustratingly short supply

Is this even an opera?

Yes, there is possibly more horror in the score for Asle & Alida than we have heard from Sørensen before, and it’s admirably wrought from an orchestra more ready to extend downwards, particularly into low percussion. But the emotional conflict can be blunt and we miss the pervasive presence of a vital, luminous inner thread that characterises Sørensen’s best music and elevates it above a mere tapestry of half-memories. Much of what we hear is precisely that: it feels plucked from the composer’s regular toolkit, stretched too thin, without the unequivocal central image that emerges from underneath Fosse’s writing.  

For a theatre piece, drama is also in frustratingly short supply. Is Asle & Alida an opera? There is limited character interaction beyond that with the unnamed characters, and the lack of a narrator leaves the title characters to evangelise their own stories, straight to us. In form, the work resembles Sørensen’s St Mathew Passion. It might be better described as a meditation or a secular oratorio than an opera. 

Could it, however, have worked better as an opera? Might more of the incessant, heady repetitions of Fosse’s original text for Trilogy, largely missing from his libretto, have added to the stage work’s sense of disorientation and even hysteria? Might that, in turn, have prompted a more transfixing score from Sørensen, one more willing to spiral into the frenzied state that characterises much of the book, setting his delicate melodic collages in greater relief? Where was the silence – and the quiet hinterland around it – that so often charges a Sørensen score with intensity and which this story, surely, craves? 

If this is a strangely dissatisfying (and yes, often boring) evening in the theatre, Jupither’s production has to shoulder a significant proportion of the responsibility

Maybe it’s not for critics to hypothetically rewrite Sørensen’s score. Line for line, it does prove a resonant vessel for Fosse’s textual mosaic. Perhaps it’s that story’s own elusive moral and empathetic core, as much as its lack of dramatic flashpoints, that makes it such a problematic proposition in the opera house. No wonder Sørensen’s music stops short of telling us what this tale is really about or where its centre of moral gravity lies. If Trilogy is about one thing, it’s surely about the will to live, whether in this life or another: a striving through relentless pain towards eventual release. On first hearing, at least, I struggled to hear that in Sørensen’s score, which is doubly frustrating given his proven capacity to deliver it in previous works.

If this is a strangely dissatisfying (and yes, often boring) evening in the theatre, Jupither’s production has to shoulder a significant proportion of the responsibility. Directors have done far more on stage with oratorios and Passion settings. Even when faced with a told narrative rather than an acted one, a skilful theatrical storyteller can use canny devices to ensure audiences don’t end up staring at two static tableaux for 100 minutes, as we do here (in this case, tableaux strongly resembling the look of Jupither’s last outing on this very stage, a production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde a year ago).

A vision adrift

As it is, the musicianship of the performers is left to carry the can. The Royal Danish Orchestra takes well to Sørensen sound-world, to which it has been less acclimatized of late than some of its symphonic counterparts. High strings and brass prove particularly adept at that melting, evaporating phraseology and harmonic smudging but the ensemble as a whole does well to capture the music’s throbbing, tapping ebb and flow under conductor Eivind Gullberg Jensen. The Royal Opera Chorus sings with the mixture of mist and precision that the music needs. 

As it is, the musicianship of the performers is left to carry the can

Wiktor Sundqvist sings a clean, lyrical Alse but Louise McClelland Jacobsen makes far more impact as his lover, pushing the music to the limits of its dramatic capacity and proving her voice’s increasing sheen, power and agility. Christina Jønsi’s Young Woman is invested with plenty of vocal and physical character. Johannes Weisser is outstanding as the Old Man, his voice shape-shifting from basso to falsetto as creepily as his body contorts itself in parallel. As the Old Woman, it’s good to see Randi Stene back on this stage, now cameoing given her role as artistic director of the Opera in Oslo. Will she programme Asle & Alida at her company? If so, it needs an entirely new production at the very least. 

»Asle & Alida«, Royal Danish Opera, May 21 (Danish premiere)