WHY GILGAMESH?

By Louis Garrick

Once upon a time, opera was a jewel in the cultural crown. For a certain echelon, opening nights were the hottest ticket in town. The divas were international celebrities and opera composers amongst the most revered artists of their time. When they built a new opera house, it couldn’t just be any old barn—it had to be an architectural masterpiece for the entire world to behold. 

Those days are long gone. Over the past couple of decades, there’s been a tectonic shift in interest away from the classical arts, especially for younger generations. Once held up as an emblem of collective cultural achievement, opera is now considered, at best, an archaic curio, at worst, a symbol of something many Australians instinctively detest: elitism.

Make no mistake: opera is in crisis. The core audience of people who are genuinely interested in the art form, not just tourists and those dropping in for a special occasion, is vanishing. Costs remain enormous with orchestras and choruses to pay for and, with inflation, it’s not getting any cheaper. None of this is new, but the pandemic ripped the whole thing open. Governments, which had to bail opera companies out and continue to pick up half the bill, have been actively asking the question: should we really be funding something that appears relevant only to the privileged? Some have already made up their mind: look at what’s happened to the English National Opera and, now, even Berlin’s fabled Komische Oper faces an existential threat. 

It’s not just the air of exclusivity that puts people off. It’s the operas themselves. A heroine, torn between two men, finds no solution but to throw herself off a bridge. A heroine, dominated by her controlling father, goes crackers. A heroine, having fled from an abusive lover, is punished for it by murder. Catch my drift? Even a seemingly immortal classic like Mozart’s Così fan tutte—loosely translated as “chicks be like”—is beginning to look like a creaky old thing whose place on the contemporary stage is dubious. And the usual retort, “Oh, but the music is so beautiful,” doesn’t really cut it with today’s audiences, who don’t care enough for classical music to excuse the oh dear factor. 

Opera must change—and is being forced to. No one knows what the opera landscape of the future looks like, but it will probably involve a doubling down on what the Germans call alte Kamellen—old camels—like Carmen and Rigoletto, basically because they’re the ones the general public have heard of, plus ever more money-spinners in the form of Broadway musicals and the like, even though purists might not consider them opera at all. That might keep the industry going for now, but what about the art form itself?

One thing we can be certain of is that opera won’t die. Invented more than four hundred years ago, the art form has survived whole epochs; not even the societal and aesthetic convulsions of the twentieth century could knock it over.

Ancient Urartu cuneiform from Van fortress.

Here’s where Sydney Chamber Opera comes into the picture. Year after year, this small but heroic company puts new operas on the stage, thereby propounding ideas that actually address the fundamental question: what is the opera of tomorrow? And, because its productions are leaner in scale than a traditional grand opera, ticket prices are affordable, making opera accessible to those who don’t want to pay an arm and a leg for an evening at the theatre. Of course, there are different definitions of “accessibility.” SCO makes no bones about dwelling at the pointy end of artistic endeavour—but that’s what makes it special. It is unflinching in its commitment not to entertainment, but to beauty. 

One thing we can be certain of is that opera won’t die. Invented more than four hundred years ago, the art form has survived whole epochs; not even the societal and aesthetic convulsions of the twentieth century could knock it over. Not that it hasn’t evolved over the centuries: a Handel opera with its da capo arias is nothing like the Gesamtkunstwerk of Wagner, let alone one of Kaija Saariaho’s recent masterpieces. It’s not one style or the other, it’s the idea of opera that’s durable. 

Let’s think about the art form’s beginnings in the Italy of the late Renaissance. As part of the humanist preoccupation with bringing Greek antiquity closer to the centre of intellectual life, opera’s originators set out to revive antique drama and perform it the way they believed it was originally intended: with music. Indeed, much of ancient Greek poetry was sung and performed either by wandering bards or to the accompaniment of a lyre, hence the term “lyric poetry.” The kernel of opera—that citizens come together in a place where, like gods, they can watch on as mortals expose their best and worst instincts and act out their—our—most passionate behaviours in a performance involving language, music and all the expressive possibilities of the human body—goes back thousands of years. Coming as it does from the roots of Western culture, it is an idea that will always be relevant.

We don’t know what ancient Greek music sounded like. That’s why the early opera composers couched these timeless stories, of Orpheus, of Odysseus, of Medea, in the music of their time. And this is exactly what we are doing in Gilgamesh. No, it’s not Greek. The originators of opera also turned their quills to Biblical, Roman and other historical subjects, much like the painters and other artists of the same era. Given that the Epic of Gilgamesh is an antecedent to the epics of Homer, had they known about it—the clay tablets on which it is engraved were lost until the nineteenth century—they might well have composed a Gilgamesh opera themselves.

Like those Renaissance pioneers, we, in making Gilgamesh, are collectively scouring what remains of the cradle of civilisation in search of clues as to what is truly universal. We ask: who are we? What does it mean to be human? We commune with those who have come before us. We listen. We learn. We swap notes. We certainly don’t always agree: thank heavens we don’t live in a society where, for example, women are literally the property of men, as was mostly the case in ancient Mesopotamia. The Assyrians also thought the sun was a god, and didn’t know where it went at night. But, for every feature of Gilgamesh’s world that isn’t recognisable to us, there’s something that is. There’s brutal questing for power, reflection on humanity’s relationship with nature, an obsession with the twin mysteries of sex and death. Moreover, the characters are driven by primary emotions like ambition, jealousy, vengeance, fear, grief and, of course, desire—is that not the stuff of opera? Is that not the stuff of human life?

It’s important to understand that we are not archeologists attempting to decode the beliefs and ways of an extinct people. We read what’s written on those clay tablets with contemporary eyes. Certain elements jump out at us that might not have for past generations, like Gilgamesh’s apparent homosexuality, while other aspects that have previously been dwelt upon, such as Gilgamesh’s spiritual struggle with mortality, recede somewhat into the background. What we’ve done is subjective. It’s a take, not a study.

We are also artists, not museum curators. We tell Gilgamesh’s story in our own words—that is to say, with utterly contemporary musical and theatrical language which makes the most of what Sydney Chamber Opera’s virtuoso performers have to offer (with some cutting-edge electronics thrown in), all refracted through the prism of contemporary queerness. Despite being based on the oldest written story in existence, Gilgamesh is absolutely a work of our times in that sense. But don’t worry, folks. It’s still very much a capital-O opera, with frocks, a triumphal march, a diva that makes a stunning entrance, a love duet, a tragic death scene and—believe it or not—a couple of tunes.

Louvre Museum, Department of Near Eastern Antiquities Gilgamesh and Lion, Human headed winged bull, Assyria

Now, what I was actually asked to write about was how I wrote the libretto. How, indeed, does one turn a long, highly episodic and very strangely proportioned poem that has a zillion characters and locations as well as whole chunks missing into a coherent piece of lyric theatre? Here goes. After reading the Epic in several different versions—Andrew George’s authoritative translation into English being the most pertinent—I sat down with the composer, Jack Symonds, and discussed the big picture: what does this mean to us and what do we want to say about it? I then set about grasping the emotional shape of the story, which guided me in decisions about what to keep and what to jettison from the sprawling text. Out of this came an embryonic structure from which, following a phase of learning about the historical context and further deliberation with Jack and others, I sketched the eight scenes that make up the opera. Here I must acknowledge the Berlin-based thinker and writer Jakub Stańczyk, who was an invaluable sounding board at this early point in the work’s development.

While writing, I always had several questions on my mind. What might the authors of the Epic have meant? How would the average millennial interpret what they wrote? How can this work on stage? Who will be singing this and how can I lean into their strengths as a performer? Most important of all, will these words and forms inspire the composer? On this point, I’m fortunate to have a background in music. It meant I knew exactly what tools were at my disposal: arias, recitatives, duets, choruses, and so on. And, during my time as artistic director of Sydney Chamber Opera between 2010 and 2015, I developed strong instincts for when and how to deploy them.

Out of this a draft came into existence. Writers and readers may be interested to know how many of the words are “mine” and how many come from the tablets via translations. The answer isn’t straightforward. As there’s little conventional dialogue in the Epic, many, many lines and several whole scenes are my own invention. On the other hand, I borrow a lot of specific phrases and imagery from the tablets, such as the suggestive description of Gilgamesh loving the half-man, half-beast Enkidu “like a wife,” and pretty much the entirety of the love-goddess Ishar’s song of seduction is zhuzhed-up version of what appears in the Andrew George translation. I mean, she tries to convince Gilgamesh to sleep with her by promising that all his goats will bear triplets if he does. How could I ever cut that? If I had to put a number on it, I’d say it’s 75% my own words—whatever that even means.

Then I sent the draft to Jack. After some back and forth as well as significant input from the director, Kip Williams, my work was done. Aspiring librettists take note: the words come first, then the music. And one of the peculiar features of writing an opera is that because music takes so long to compose, the text has to be completed many months or even years before anyone steps foot in a rehearsal room, with very little wriggle room for editing after the fact. There was a moment when I was having second thoughts about a scene which was supposed to be finished. I asked Jack, who had already written the music, “can we change this?” The answer recalled a hissing female cat fiercely protecting her young with tooth and claw. Luckily, we reached a happy compromise. As Barrie Kosky says, one must embrace the messiness of the process—and I can’t emphasise enough that while I had my own job to do making a blueprint for the team to work off, what the audience will experience is the result of a deeply collaborative chain of activity.

And that’s the nuts and bolts of it. Though, for my money, what really matters is not exactly how Gilgamesh was made, rather the spirit of the project—and the work produced. I’m put in mind of something the legendary American opera director Peter Sellars once said to a very youthful Jack and I between rehearsals of the Oedipus Rex he’d brought to the Sydney Festival years ago. “Our job as artists is simple,” he said. “See what’s not there, then put it there.”

Berlin, 2024

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