Had you already read Animal Farm when you were asked to turn this book into an opera?

“When the proposal was first discussed, I knew what the book was about but I had never read it. I had read Orwell’s 1984. In the Soviet Union, these books had been strictly banned. When I read Animal Farm, I knew immediately this was about us. Although the Stalinist regime had just ended when my life began – I was born on the day of Stalin’s funeral – the stories were very familiar to me. My grandfather had lived in the Gulag for years and my parents, as medics with Jewish roots, had suffered from Stalin’s campaign against Jewish doctors. That led my father to give up his profession and become a satirical journalist instead. By the time of his death Stalin had made plans to deport Jewish Soviet citizens to the east. So the Stalin era is intimately connected with my personal history.”

You had an important role in the creation of the libretto. What were you looking for in your adaptation of the text?

“I did indeed make changes to the libretto in close consultation with Ian Burton, who produced the first version. When Orwell wrote his book, he did not have all the knowledge we have today about the early years of the Soviet Union. That is why I added various references to the text such as quotes from Stalin, Trotsky and Beria. I modelled the character Squealer somewhat on Beria, who was the head of the state security apparatus, and added a scene referring to how Beria abused his power to force beautiful actresses and other women into intimacies. It is only a short scene but it is important: details like this make the story more lifelike.

I also edited the text in other ways. Initially the libretto had narrative passages that made it somewhat ‘oratorio-like’, so I turned that into direct action and dialogues. I looked for stronger contrasts and opportunities for ensembles. I also made the sentences shorter, because I feel opera does not tolerate long phrases.

There are three ‘e-words’ that express what this opera should be for me: energetic, eccentric and extravagant. I think it is important that opera communicates with its audience: someone who comes to the performance with no prior knowledge should be immediately touched by the story and the music.”

And how is that reflected in your composition?

“I developed a kind of ‘scalpel style’ for this opera, with short musical lines and sharp contrasts. I also looked for the appropriate musical rhythm. In addition to melody and timbre, it is important to find a rhythm that takes hold of the audience’s ears.

I believe we can learn something from the great era of opera of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I greatly appreciate the skills of contemporary composers and the complexity of their operas, but sometimes I wonder if we are not going too far by developing ever more complex musical idioms. Too much information in a short timespan can be exhausting. In Animal Farm, I was looking for a way to recover a forgotten syntax of the ‘old’ operas and apply it in a new situation — a way of using melody and rhythm to capture and hold the audience’s attention.”

Does that mean a return to opera’s original simplicity?

“You can also see this as a further development. Since Alban Berg, opera orchestrationshave become increasingly complex, but writing for voices is not substantially different from what it was a hundred years ago. I try to bring the voice to the same level as the orchestra. I want to put it in the foreground and make the most of its power.

Together, the soloists of Animal Farm can be seen as a kind of vocal orchestra. Hardly any of the roles could be called supporting roles: each character has their own personality and development. I lay awake at night wondering how to find sufficient musical contrast between all those characters. Eventually I found a way. Before I started working on a part, I sat down in a chair and let the scene play in my imagination. That helped me find distinct characters. That’s how each character got their own texture and range, from extraordinarily high to extremely low.”

You have sometimes said that you came to understand the capabilities of the human voice through intensive exposure to Russian folk music. When was that?

“It was in the 1970s, and I must have been about twenty years old. As part of our composition studies, we had to travel around Russia with an ethnographer to collect songs. The polyphony of those songs was incredibly complex. Each singer had to be recorded on a separate tape recorder so that we could notate the vocal lines later, and even then it was very difficult to translate the vocals into notes. At that time, I didn’t realise how important this experience would be for my later understanding of the voice and how it works in an ensemble.

“We visited different places in the Don region over two weeks. I remember four women getting together in the morning with a bottle of particularly strong vodka and a jar of pickles. Each time they sang a song, they drank a glass of vodka and ate a pickle, and we had to join in. Eight times, for eight songs. I asked, ‘Why do you do it like that?’ and one of the women said, ‘Otherwise the song would have no soul.’ Later, when I attended a performance of the same music in a concert hall in Moscow, it didn’t work. It was an interesting concert, but you have to hear these kinds of songs where the people live, where the music lives.

After graduation, I had a chance to travel to Magadan, all the way across on the east coast of Russia. That was part of a government programme to get composers’ music heard by workers all over the country. I don’t know if they needed my music there, but for me it was great to get to know that place and hear the music of the nomads who lived there. Only later did I discover how formative these experiences had been. Now that I live in the West, I am becoming more aware of where my roots are.”

And do those experiences shine through in Animal Farm?

“Maybe they do. I don’t know how the brain works and perhaps I don’t want to know. As a composer, it’s important to make a kind of synthesis of your childhood musical memories, the folk music you have come across and the work of composers you admire. All those impressions have to be turned into an idiom that is yours and no one else’s: life experiences transformed into music. For me, those introductions to folk music are as meaningful as the encounters I had with composers like Schnittke and Weinberg.

Arriving at such a synthesis is even more important in an opera. Opera is quite different from symphonic work or chamber music: it is not a pure genre. It requires an open mind and a kind of polystylism. You already see that with Mozart – think of the way he interweaves three orchestras in a famous moment in Don Giovanni, or how in Die Zauberflöte he incorporates sound imitations in Papageno’s part. But I am also thinking of the various quotations or allusions to folk music that you find in operas by Russian composers such as Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov or Shostakovich. You can incorporate all sorts of things in an opera in a new and sometimes totally inverse context, to produce a paradoxical effect. Opera is not a purist or scholastic art form; opera should be full of life.”

Text WOUT VAN TONGEREN/DUTCH NATIONAL OPERA
Photos RUTH WALZ/DUTCH NATIONAL OPERA