Composer George Benjamin: ‘Writing an opera is like diving into a pool for the first time’

He was tricked into it. George Benjamin’s fourth opera, Picture A Day Like This, will be given its world premiere on July 5 at the Aix-en-Provence festival. Last month in Munich, he was awarded the Ernst von Siemens prize, the Nobel Prize of the music world, worth a quarter of a million euros. Yet, Benjamin admits, he would never have begun to compose his celebrated operas without the subterfuge of his friends.

Joséphine Markovits, who has steered Paris’s prestigious cross-art-form Festival d’Automne for three decades, announced a 2006 focus on Benjamin’s work as a composer — but with the specification that he compose his first opera for it. “And I wrote lots of letters saying, ‘No, it’s not possible. I can’t do this. I don’t know who to work with, and I haven’t got enough time.’ But she didn’t take no for an answer. She stuffed me with chocolate — very good chocolate from Paris — and kept on.”

Meanwhile, academic and musician Larry Dreyfus introduced him to writer Martin Crimp, saying that Crimp “knew and loved his work”. “The truth was, Larry had gone to Tower Records and bought the only CD of my chamber music in the shop. He’d sent it to Martin, who told Larry, ‘OK, I’d like to meet this guy.’ But that was translated into, ‘He knows your work’!”

Benjamin was cornered, and Into the Little Hill, surely the nastiest, funniest and most arresting version of the disturbing medieval legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin ever penned, was born.

Writing an opera, he says, “is like diving into a pool for the first time. It’s cold down there. It’s deep. And I don’t want to go in. Eventually somebody has to nudge you. And that’s what Joséphine and Larry did. Without them, I’d never have written four of these things.”

Benjamin had been writing operas “in his head” since early childhood. He was thrilled by opera — he knew Richard Strauss’s Modernist milestones Salome and Elektra by heart (“I told you I was a strange child!”), and at 13 discovered Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. “In the whole history of opera, I don’t think there’s anything greater than that. It moves me so deeply — I think it is the most fabulous, wonderful, magnificent thing.”

The single words have a rhythm that rotates across the piece. It’s incredibly precisely etched, and also unbelievably economical

When he was 15 years old, he began to study composition with Olivier Messiaen, who later described Benjamin as his favourite pupil. “Messaien was a genius, but he was also incredibly sweet and kind and generous and warm and encouraging . . . His classes were a revelation to me in terms of rhythm, his extraordinary approach to harmony, his openness to many different non-western musical styles, and his insight into western music going back to the medieval period.”

Benjamin went on to study with Alexander Goehr and Robin Holloway at King’s College, Cambridge, and he stayed in touch with Messiaen until his death in 1992.

While still a student, the 20-year-old Benjamin became the youngest living composer to have his music performed at the Proms; his Ringed by the Flat Horizon, a vivid aural picture of a thunderstorm over New Mexico, thrums with eerie tension. Two years later, Simon Rattle conducted the London Sinfonietta for the world premiere of his At First Light, which captures the hazy radiance of Turner’s painting “Norham Castle, Sunrise”. Benjamin’s imaginative scoring is characteristically specific, demanding a “large newspaper” and a “ping-pong ball with flat-bottomed drinking glass”.

But for all his early success, it was only when Benjamin met Crimp that he could begin to write the operas that catapulted him to a knighthood, the Ernst von Siemens prize, the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion and many more accolades. The symbiotic relationship between Crimp’s words and Benjamin’s notes is the defining characteristic of their operas. Both are spare and deliberate, clear yet dreamlike. There is no other partnership like it in today’s opera world.

“I’m an opera composer because of Martin and with Martin. There’s an electric current between us when I’m writing. His texts are created like crystals; the single words have a rhythm that rotates across the piece. It’s incredibly precisely etched, and also unbelievably economical. Sentences are short, words are simple, yet there’s a complexity of background. He gives me nice syllables, so that at climactic moments, I can do things with the voice.”

All Benjamin’s operas — after Into The Little Hill came the mesmerising Written on Skin, followed by the harsher, more political Lessons in Love and Violence — open abruptly. “You need to plunge straight into the drama without any preparation. And to have a fully formed sound world, right from the beginning.”

That is impossible, Benjamin says, so he borrows a trick from Messiaen and his friend Elliott Carter, and starts somewhere in the middle. “I find some modest little corner inviting me in, and expand from that.”

Picture a Day Like This follows the quest of a woman who has been told that if she can find a completely happy person, her child will live. Each scene is a new universe, with its own sound world. For these diverse soundscapes, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra — with whom he has enjoyed a long and close relationship — seemed the obvious choice. “The range of colours they produce in the strings — it’s like looking at mother-of-pearl. They’re infinitely variegated, incredibly subtle and incredibly refined, though they can also be immensely powerful.”

In all these performances, Benjamin conducts. “When I was a child, I already made stage music. We were assembling little ensembles when I was 10; I’ve always loved to participate in performance. At least I have some degree of competence, which can get us towards what I want.

“With my own pieces, I can be picky, changing dynamics, prolonging a note, changing articulation or tempo. Besides, I’ve been stuck in my studio at home for so long! It’s so isolated. It’s just very, very nice to come out and make music with people.”

July 5-23, festival-aix.com