Finnegans Wake as Opera

Can you imagine an opera based on Finnegans Wake?

It's a book full of echoes of operatic arias and Irish popular songs. Joyce borrowed from Wagner the idea of the leitmotif, which in the Wake is a recurring rhythmic phrase, attached to characters and ideas. There are more than a thousand of these, which Clive Hart catalogued in Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake.

In 1937, Joyce told Jan Parandowski that his aim in writing his book was 'to marry sounds which were not usually joined together before, although they were meant for one another, to allow water to speak like water, birds to chirp in the words of birds, to liberate all sounds of rustling, breaking, arguing, shouting, cracking, whistling, creaking, gurgling - from their servile, contemptible role and to attach them to the feelers of expressions which grope for definitions of the undefined. I took literally Gautier's dictum, 'The inexpressible does not exist.' With this hash of sounds I am building the great myth of everyday life.'

Right now, there are two Wake operas in progress. In the USA, the composer Augusta Read Thomas and librettist Thomas Peter O'Brien are working on a two-act opera based on the Anna Livia Purabelle chapter. They will be drawing on "some of the 3,000+ references to opera that he fused into his flourishing text."

Meanwhile, the Scottish composer Alastair White is turning the whole novel into an opera, in a cycle of works culminating in the book's centenary in 2039. Alastair and his producer Gemma White were inspired by the way that Joyce brought out his 'Work in Progress' in stages, with sections published in booklets and in little magazines like the Transatlantic Review and transition.

On 5 September, Lisa and I went to the London's Irish Centre in Camden for 'Here Comes Everybody', the overture to the opera, and the start of the cycle.

We walked to Camden from St Pancras Station, following the Regent's Canal, where I was pleased to see a reminder of HCE, twice described as a ‘gasometer’.

'Yerra, why would he heed that old gasometer with his hooping coppin and his dyinboosycough...' 95.07

'he's as globeful as a gasometer of lithium and luridity' 131.36

This was our first visit to the London Irish Centre, which is in a fine Georgian townhouse in a leafy residential area. It was opened by Catholic priests in 1955, to meet the needs of Irish emigrants, arriving by the boat train to Euston. A plaque on the wall honours the 'forgotten Irish' who came to work and rebuild this city and country ravaged by World War Two.

It was a nice surprise to find a proper Irish pub behind the doors, with Guinness, whiskey and Clonakilty pork sausages.

Pre-show pints with Jess and Nick, fellow Wakeans

'The more Guinness you drink the clearer Finnegans Wake gets.' Robert Anton Wilson

There's also a bust of Samuel Beckett.

In the programme notes, Alastair White described his approach to creating the opera.

“Central to the adaptation’s approach is a radical re-reading of Finnegans Wake and the modernist canon: that authors such as Joyce, Eliot and Hemingway continue to be misread through romantic and post-modern analyses that see them as depths rather than surfaces. The project contends that — like the sparse prose of Hills Like White Elephants — Finnegans Wake has been ill-used by approaches that attempt to ‘decode’ it through what is absent: in ignorance of the sheer joy that the language embodies. There is no iceberg, no skeleton key; Finnegans Wake is not a cipher. It is only itself.”

'It is only itself' reminded me of Samuel Beckett's description of the book:

"Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read--or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself....When the sense is dancing, the words dance."

Samuel Beckett, 'Dante...Bruno.Vico. Joyce', Our Exagmination round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, 1929, p.14

The idea of treating the book as surface recalls one of Joyce's last statements about it, made in 1940 to Heinrich Straumann, the Zurich Professor of English literature:

''One should not pay any particular attention to the allusions to placenames, historical events, literary happenings and personalities, but let the linguistic phenomenon affect one as such.''

H Straumann, 'Last Meeting with Joyce', A James Joyce Yearbook, ed Maria Jolas, 1949, p.114

The audience sat in a wide semicircle, with candles on the floor.

The overture was performed by Ensemble Exposé, conducted by Roger Redgate. Formed in 1984, the group 'has become known for its commitment to presenting the most challenging of contemporary music. The ensemble has assembled an international membership of virtuoso musicians and a repertoire whose power and directness is matched by its lack of intellectual compromise.'

The musicians were Caroline Balding (violin), Bridget Carey (viola), Clare O'Donnell (cello), Rowland Sutherland (flute) Christopher Redgate (oboe), Heather Roche (clarinet) and Chris Brannick (percussion)

The Irish actor Cathal Murray gave two beautiful readings from the book, of the closing and opening pages. I filmed a small part of the second reading.

The first twenty minutes was a string section, with flowing interweaving lines from violin and cello, with percussive playing from the cello. Robert Hugill, who has reviewed the concert on his excellent blog, was struck by the 'jagged violence' of the opening section, which you can hear part of on YouTube.

Then the wind players joined in.  

I found the whole piece accessible and beautiful, but also full of surprises.

Listening, I kept thinking of the book's opening chapter, which itself is a sort of overture. There was a climactic percussion solo, which made me think of the Wake's thunderclaps.  In the Q and A session after Alastair explained that he wasn't thinking of any specific passages while composing the piece. He said that he saw the overture as taking place in the space between the book's ending and opening, in a moment of turn and recirculation.

Looking ahead, he said that he's also planning to use the text in translation in the libretto.

It was great to meet Alastair, and I'm looking forward to the next instalment of his mighty project.