A widow, determined to protect her daughter from disappointment, orders the girl's suitor to "prove his worth" before the couple may marry. The daughter is strongheaded and resourceful enough, however, to have other ideas. Composer Raymond Deane's new opera, his second, is a ghostly romance. The Wall of Cloud, for four voices, commissioned by Opera Theatre Company, conducted by organist David Adams, and directed by Jason Byrne, may sound modern but is based on a 13th-century Chinese story.
"I first read it in a collection of Chinese ghost stories and I thought it would be very suitable for an opera, but dismissed it because I thought it wouldn't be adaptable for the stage. Then I came across it in an actual Chinese state adaptation from the Yuan dynasty."
Deane, who has always explored extremes and contradictions, has written a beautiful, subtle libretto for a score which has aimed at a light, delicate texture while also achieving a remote, slightly unearthly quality - a tension created more by longing and maternal guilt than by direct conflict.
Written for flute, treble recorder, clarinet, harp, percussion, violin, cello and double-bass, the score evokes Stravinsky and Berg. The characterisation is interesting in that the mother, far from being a gorgon, is a woman aware of the powerlessness of women, lamenting rather matter-of-factly: "Mothers have nothing to say/when it comes to the fate of their children/Their daughters are given away/without consultation or leave/by men who run off to the wars/and get killed."
Deane deliberately set out to make the mother (sung by Colette McGahon) a sympathetic figure. "In the original, she is a caricature." Daughter is no push-over, either. Although the match had been arranged by their respective fathers, the girl is well pleased by her intended when she meets him and does not accept her mother's decision. By force of will she manages to stay with her mother while also running away. It sounds like a neat trick of bi-location. Daughter's contrasting selves are sung by Nicola Sharkey and Sinead Blanchfield.
As already stated, Deane enjoys extremes; his work has always had a strong character although it may have, of late, become less dense. The least compelling of the three characters is the lover (sung by tenor Eugene Ginty) who dutifully sets about making something of himself and of whom Deane says with a shrug: "He's just a guy." Still, the lover is faced with a bizarre situation.
The youngest of four children, Deane was born in Galway in 1953: "on January 27th - Mozart's birthday". It is a coincidence which he discovered at 17 on arriving to study music at University College Dublin. What would appear a pretty good omen for any musician seems to mean little to him, and he is clearly more envious of his sister who shares a birthday with Kafka.
Deane spent his first 10 years on Achill Island, where his mother was a teacher and his father ran the local dole office, and as he says of his parents, together they had the two most important jobs on the island. "It is a wonderful place but . . ." The but says a lot. He feels he never really fitted in there.
He was a middle-class boy, already learning piano and living in a big house - "not big house as in `Big House' but it was large, with a wood and several acres of land. The house was filled with books; my father was a great reader." He is an intense character, highly intellectual, relentlessly honest and a master of the ironic phrase. The playful irony of his work is certainly evident in his wit. Deane may be formidable and appears far older than his years, but his world-weary humour ensures his conversation is as amusing as it is informed. He also seems a lot less angry than he may once have been, but remains driven.
When asked would he accept that his sound is more cerebral than instinctive, Deane, who studied composition under Gerald Bennett and Stockhausen, challenges the observation. "Music is the great unifying of the sensibilities. It is very powerfully intellectual but it also defers to the senses. After all, Bach regarded his music as a contribution to science."
Family life on Achill did not last long. As his two brothers and sister had already made the journey to Dublin boarding schools, Deane in time also moved to the city. Initially he attended "a Christian Brother school which shall remain nameless". He was transferred to Belvedere College, "a nice easy-going school", which he seems to have liked. By 14, however, he had had enough. "I wanted to be alone," he says with a Garboesque flourish, and settled into studying at home. Music had become his life and he was already committed to becoming a composer. "I made that decision at the age of 10." When did music become so important? "When we moved from Achill, the piano stayed behind for a while. I really missed it."
Yet in his early years he admits to having been very impatient with music. "I thought as soon as you learnt to read music, you'd be able to play. I didn't think it took 10 years," he says with an acceptable sense of outraged logic, and then mentions his stint as a church organist - "I wasn't a good organist."
Having spent four years studying on his own, he matriculated and went to university. One of his regrets is not having realised the value of the Greek he could have learnt at Belvedere, but he speaks German, French and Italian. As he says himself, "I read everything".
Literature is almost as important to him as music. Deane's first novel, Death of a Medium, which he describes as a "kind of mock Gothic" was published in 1991. He has three others waiting for his attention. A review he wrote for this paper two years ago of a new Mozart biography was interpreted as an attack on the composer. While Deane agrees he did set out to provoke, he did not intend it to be seen as a dismissal of Mozart. He did seem to be saying that Mozart had become a security blanket of sorts for middle-class people intent on culture. The real objection to Deane's review was its subversive intelligence and honesty. "At his best, of course, Mozart is a great composer. What I was saying is that there is a massive body of work and not all of it wonderful." Though Mozart is not one of his favourite composers, Deane says he has come to like many of his works and admires his piano concertos. His tastes move about; Britten is another composer he has at times been wary of, but has come to like.
While he changes his mind, his opinions are invariably conclusive; he does not admire Gorecki or Part, nor does he favour Cage or Glass. "I listen to very little contemporary music; I don't like that much of it. I find that the only composers to whose work I mainly listen to are those born usually before 1930." Speaking of his former teacher, composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, he says: "I wasn't really his student" - the implication is that by then Stockhausen, who was born in 1928, was not really teaching. "I think he was a great composer up to 1976 and then, wasn't." In 1977, Stockhausen announced his intention to create a vast seven-opera work, one for each day of the week, for solo voices, solo instruments, solo dancers, choirs, orchestras, mimes and electronics. That same year he digitally re-mastered his entire 205-piece oeuvre.
It is true that Deane is not a man to express loud enthusiasms. He is too guarded for that, and is more inclined to analyse than praise. Even as a student he was a composer and soon became established as a performer of his own piano music, appearing in the Dublin Festival of 20th-century Music. He refers to a body he had formed, the Association of Young Irish Composers, "the YICS - now the ICS - no longer the young. . ."
While determined not to emerge as a complainer, Deane speaks of the vibrant atmosphere in which young composers such as himself worked in the 1970s. But this vibrancy vanished in the 1980s, he says, and, as expected, he criticises the middle-of-the-road policy adopted by the National Concert Hall, while conceding that modern music is performed.
There is, of course, another huge dimension to the ongoing dilemma of Deane's generation of Irish classical composers - much of the music has not been recorded and is therefore not available. Deane, a strongly European composer, has at 46 produced a large body of work including Quaternion, Krespel's Concerto, Dekatriad, Idols, the early organ work which he revised in 1996 and Concerto for Oboe and Large Orchestra. Many of his works have been commissioned, such as Ecarts, composed for string trio, and his previous opera, The Poet and His Double.
and commissioned by the Music Network. In 1987 he was chosen from submissions by 15 composers to celebrate the Dublin millennium. He has also been a member of Aosdana since 1986. As early as 1991, at the age of 38, he was honoured, or at least acknowledged, by having a retrospective featuring about a third of his works to date, performed.
It is obvious that he has never had to compromise himself by writing to please the market. "By Irish standards I've done pretty well in Ireland. But we are very bad at exporting our classical music. You can be anywhere abroad and you will hear people saying "Irish music is doing very well" but by that they will probably be referring to U2 or Riverdance."
At present he is in the unusual position of having recordings of several works about to be released. In addition to The Wall of Cloud tour, another new work for violin and piano, Parthenia Violiata, premieres next month in Sligo. Unlike many composers, he has also been able to concentrate fully on his own music. He has never taught. Would he have any interest? The expression on his face registers a definitive No.
DESPITE his years studying, and working in Europe, which included more than four years in Germany, Deane, who is well settled in Dublin, retains some essence of his west of Ireland origins. He seems pleased by the observation, remarking "I'm usually seen as South Dublin middle-class cosmopolitan." He lives in Dun Laoghaire, his partner is an artist and they have no children.
The Wall of Cloud will be performed during the Wexford Opera Festival and so Deane will visit the festival for the first time. Making it obvious that he is wary of events in which the emphasis is more on social than cultural aspects, he says: "It's not that I mind dressing up. I quite like the idea of that but. . ." again the "but" refers to the trappings. As a student he was quite radical politically, and while not a party-follower retains a strong social conscience, blaming his sore throat on his participation in a recent protest march.
According to David Adams, The Wall of Cloud is Deanes's best work to date. It seems difficult to discover exactly how angry the former Angry Young Man of contemporary Irish classical music may have once been, but his subtle new opera is a delicate and human work which is as rigorous as it is beautiful.
The Wall of Cloud opens in Longford on Oct 13th; runs in the Dublin Theatre Festival on Oct 15th and 16th; Waterfront Hall, Belfast, Oct 18th; the Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny on Oct 21st and the Wexford Opera Festival, Oct 23rd
