However, it wasn’t until 2021 that I finally set some text that Louis had adapted from the Epic, for a short song cycle commissioned by Phoenix Central Park. It breaks parts of the Flood narrative into three distinct songs, ending with a very slow ‘vision’: “I saw the face of the earth. There was nothing other than silence. All was turned to clay”. I remember precisely where I was when I found the notes for the phrase ‘I saw the face of the earth’. I was sitting, waiting for a Covid PCR test in Redfern when the simplicity of the gesture and the harmonic implications of this very basic material suddenly turned the key, opening vast tracts of musical territory to me. I instantly became very excited by the idea and somehow knew then how huge portions of the piece would pan out even though they would only be finished years later.

I immediately wrote a set of piano nocturnes and a solo viola sonata – small-scale, personal testing grounds for other Gilgamesh-related ideas. All of these have found their way into the opera, with an entire movement of the viola sonata forming a virtuosic obbligato to the goddess Ishtar’s ill-fated attempted seduction of Gilgamesh in the fifth scene.

The next major determining factor of the musical world of Gilgamesh then came over summer 2021/2022 when I received a commission from the Australian String Quartet (ASQ) for a big new string quartet. I was very deep in the planning and sketching of a lot more of Gilgamesh’s material by then, but it was in a highly volatile state; it didn’t have a fixed instrumentation, duration or form – it was like a kind of inchoate lava, incapable of behaving in a rational way, no matter what I did to it. However, I felt sure its essence was ‘right’ for various scenes, characters, motifs and philosophical/existential ideas I needed to create in the opera. 

Conceiving and composing the string quartet naturally fused with many of these remaining Gilgamesh ideas, bringing them into sharp focus, giving them a definite and precise character and affixing them to the colour of a string quartet—specifically the colour of the ASQ itself. 

About 90% of the 20-minute string quartet found its way into the opera, spread throughout its duration. There is no chronological link between the unfolding of the quartet and the opera, although the small-scale flow of various sections is maintained in both.  After hearing a performance of this piece by the ASQ in Canberra, I conceived an ‘alternate ending’ to it on the train trip back which I also knew would also be the ending of the whole opera, taking this long-conceived material into a barcarole that laps into infinity. 

In the quartet, the characters of Ishtar and the half-human, half-animal Enkidu are explored thoroughly, even though the narrative sequences in the opera are totally re-made into an abstract instrumental form. 

As soon as I heard the ASQ play the piece in rehearsal, I knew I had found the heart of the soundworld of ‘Gilgamesh’. It was hugely inspiring to experience this material coming vividly to life, and I wrote the rest of the opera with the ASQ’s colour and boundless virtuosity uppermost in my mind.

Writing for the combined forces of Australian String Quartet and Ensemble Offspring has meant that the instrumental lines have gained a complexity and detail quite different from those of an ‘Opera’ orchestra; each scene is focused around specific colours and notes which branch out like an arboreal system to encompass the enormous expressive shifts and character arcs in the Epic. At present, I simply can’t imagine this piece not being played by these people!

Balancing the mechanism and history of the genre (love duet, Triumphal Parade, arias of many kinds) with more extended vocalism, instrumental colour and electronic spatialisation is a fundamental part of the opera’s architecture. The addition of live electronics has allowed for a further layer of transformation: from the human to the fantastical/metahuman/eternal and back. Enkidu’s musical journey in particular begins with non-traditional vocal sound, synthesised with instrumental timbre, before being ‘humanised’ into learned singing. To do this, I have worked with the electronics designer and sound engineer Ben Carey who has realised two of my previous pieces. Ben has an acute understanding of my musical desires and I have written him a ‘part’ that requires him to capture bits of live sung and played music and work his magic to mutate them into sounds that take to a logical, superhuman extreme the organic nature of performance.

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.