The Telephone

Ben has an urgent train to catch, but hopes to pop an all-important question to his lover Lucy before he departs. Despite Ben’s attempts to get her attention, however, Lucy is continually distracted by calls on her mobile. Increasingly desperate, Ben rushes for his train without proposing – but makes one last-ditch bid to communicate with his beloved. 

The Telephone’s Director on updating Menotti’s two-hand comedy for the digital age

How did you come to be involved in The Telephone project?

I have a good relationship with Scottish Opera – I directed the Opera Highlights tour in the Autumn of 2018, and I think the Company’s General Director Alex Reedijk thought of me for this because I’m quite a cross-media director. A lot of the work I’ve done with my own company, Silent Opera, is very filmic in terms of putting the audience right inside the set, so here it’s almost as if we have a camera there instead of the audience.

Was The Telephone a work you knew well before directing it in this production?

I’d seen it previously – actually, a friend of mine had directed it at a small festival. His production was set in the 1940s, when it was written. Without knowing the opera beforehand, I remember wondering: is this going to feel very dated? But afterwards, I thought: no, not at all. There are a few moments where you have to be a little bit clever about how you interpret things, but a lot of the language is very modern.

How would you describe the themes of the opera?

Well, actually the core of the piece isn’t about the telephone at all. It’s about two people who are in love, and normal life is getting in the way. That’s certainly the way I’ve tried to look at it. It’s not that Lucy is being horrible to Ben by looking at her phone all the time. It’s just that she has so many calls coming in, and she feels she has to take them – it might be work, or she might have won the lottery!

Picking up on that, is it an opera that feels even more current in our own times than it might have done when it was written?

Yes, I think that’s why it translates so well to the modern day, because we conduct life through our phones now. They are our connections with the outside world, and they’re an endless distraction. I also think that, back in the 1940s, the opera probably did make Lucy seem a bit more obsessed with the telephone than she seems to us now, since mobile phones are such a large part of all our lives. I was determined not to make it feel like she simply sits on the sofa all day and waits to receive phone calls.

You’ve made a few very small changes to the libretto, and obviously mobile phones have replaced the landline phone of the original. Can you tell me a bit about the things you’ve had to update in your production?

First of all there’s the dialling – Menotti actually wrote in chords for Lucy to dial to. But it’s very easy to make those work: you have to faff quite a lot to use your mobile phone too, unlocking it, going to the right app, searching your contacts list and all that. But there’s one particular moment than requires a little artistic licence, which is when Lucy calls the talking clock near the middle of the opera, because of course we all have the accurate time on our mobiles already. So we’ve made it a little joke between them, that she’s being a bit silly and Googling what is the absolutely exact time down to the millisecond.

It’s Lucy who receives all the phone calls, but how would you describe Ben’s relationship with his phone?

We see at the beginning that both Lucy and Ben obviously have mobile phones. But Ben’s phone is really his timepiece for him to be able to catch his train. We’ve also played on a dynamic that I’ve noticed with myself and my husband, that when one of you is on the phone, the other tries not to be. So we see Ben really try to resist using his phone when Lucy is on her phone – he’d love to get it out and check it, but he decides he’s not going to. He does cave in a little bit towards the end, though, when we might catch a glimpse of him playing Solitaire…

The production and the film have been put together in very unusual circumstances: in a very short timeframe, and under strict physical distancing conditions. How would you describe the challenges?

I’d love to have got a shot of Lucy and Ben sitting together at the bar, but we simply couldn’t do that because the two singers had to be two metres apart. So we don’t see a lot of contact – we never see them kiss, and we never really see them embrace either. But we’ve tried to do a lot of clever perspective shots over shoulders, or with one of them in the background, for example. Also, because it’s a film rather than a staged production, a lot more people have been involved, so we’ve had to separate everyone behind the camera, using screens and corridors, for instance. It’s been an interesting experience!

How have you gone about recording sound and vision separately?

It’s the Orchestra of Scottish Opera that’s playing the score, which was pre-recorded before we started filming along with the singers, according to physical distancing guidelines as well. But when we came to filming on set, the singers couldn’t actually sing because if they did, they’d need to be three metres apart from each other, so they weren’t allowed to make any sound. But luckily this isn’t Verdi – there’s nothing here where you need to see their tonsils! We recorded it all on four days of filming, which is very tight for a 25-minute piece – it means between six and eight minutes of footage per day.

How did the singers adapt to performing on film rather than in an opera house?

Of course, they have to do the opposite to what their instincts would tell them to do on stage. There, they would instinctively double their acting, but on screen, you have to halve it, and they’ve had very little time to adapt to that. But they both took to it immediately – they’ve done an incredible job. I also think it’s wonderful that Scottish Opera are employing freelancers to make work, which is very important at this time, when a lot of us have had our careers smashed on the floor. To be able to say that this is a viable way for us to make opera, I think it’s a very valid thing to do at this time. And with the right repertoire, I think it’s really worthwhile. As a way of keeping opera alive under current restrictions, I think it’s really important in these difficult times.

If you think nothing much can happen in an opera with just one or two characters, think again. David Kettle makes the case for opera on a miniature scale

Menotti’s The Telephone feels like an outlier – a fully fledged opera, but one that employs just two characters. Intimate operas with only one or a pair of voices, however, are more prevalent than you might think. And with good reason, as we’ll see.

But can opera really be opera with just a single voice? If there’s only one character, where’s the drama, the dialogue, the drive of a storyline?

Solo operas might indeed feel somewhat unconventional, but they can nonetheless offer all those elements we’d expect, and plenty more. After all, nobody would argue that a spoken monologue couldn’t provide a genuinely theatrical experience, complete with richness of character and complexity of plot. And with opera, of course, there’s an additional element: the music can paint in the emotions, the context and the surroundings that a bare monologue has no choice but to leave implicit.

Add a second voice to an operatic creation, however, and the dramatic possibilities are immediately evident: dialogue, conflict, resolution and more. And though the scale of one- and two-voice operas might be intimate, the dramatic forces they unleash are no less powerful than those in far more lavish, epic works. In fact, their very intimacy can generate a focus so fierce and an intensity so searing that grander opera might just struggle to compete.

Paradoxical power
And, perhaps for that very reason, composers down the ages have jumped on the possibilities offered by these apparently restricted forms in what are – paradoxically – some of their most powerful operas. And the works they’ve produced may well become increasingly relevant in these times of social distancing and isolation, both in their limited physical requirements and in their often introspective themes.

If we’re talking about intensity, it’s hard to surpass what’s probably the godfather (or maybe that should be godmother) of all solo operas. Schoenberg’s Erwartung (usually translated as ‘Expectation’) from 1909 shows a woman searching for her lover in a shadowy forest, suspicious that he’s been unfaithful to her, and fearful that, if she discovers him dead, it may have been she who killed him.

Schoenberg called it a ‘monodrama’ rather than an opera, but let’s not quibble over terminology. In its dissection of its protagonist’s fragile mental state, and its immersion in nightmarish worlds of suggestion and allusion (it’s no coincidence that the opera’s librettist, Marie Pappenheim, was a devotee of the then pioneering theories of Sigmund Freud), Erwartung set the tone that later small-scale operas obediently followed. It also allowed Schoenberg free rein to explore his pioneering, atonal musical language across the giant canvas of his gargantuan orchestra. More than a century later, Erwartung remains a fascinating, somewhat enigmatic conception, way ahead of its time, that casts its audience almost in the role of voyeurs bearing witness to a woman’s inexorably fracturing mind.

Often performed in a double bill alongside the half-hour Erwartung is another early 20th-century expressionist classic. Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle – like many operatic two-handers down the centuries, as we’ll see – shines its unforgiving spotlight not on a character’s internal mental state, but on the demands, the concessions and the conflicting personalities that populate a romantic relationship. In this case, it’s between the mysterious Duke Bluebeard and his new bride Judith, who, invited into his grim abode, insists on flinging open its doors to reveal her husband’s innermost secrets.

Bluebeard’s Castle is a work rich in psychological interpretations: librettist Béla Balácz transformed Charles Perrault’s 17th-century fairytale into a story of desire, control and deception that still feels contemporary today, and Bartók clothed it in some of his most vivid, powerful music. In its allusive portrayal of power struggles between partners, it stands in a long line of two-character operas – even if it casts a distinctly gloomy pall across what was a predominantly comic legacy. Its symbolism was given a particularly memorable twist in the 2017 Scottish Opera production, directed by Matthew Lenton of Vanishing Point theatre company, which located Karen Cargill and Robert Hayward’s dysfunctional couple in a conventional, modern-day flat.

A path into darkness
You may be getting the impression that these one- and two-hand operas have tended to tread gloomy paths towards darkness and despair. If so – well, you’re not entirely wrong. And before we start seeing a bit of light and sparkle, it’s going to get a whole lot darker.

Though you might be surprised that a composer like Francis Poulenc – with the Gallic sophistication, the ear-pleasing nonchalance that so much of his music offers – would create one of the most harrowing of all solo operas. His 1958 La voix humaine (‘The Human Voice’), based on a play by Poulenc’s friend Jean Cocteau, is another one-woman work, though unlike Schoenberg’s Erwartung, here the protagonist (designated solely as ‘Elle’) interacts with other characters – unseen and unheard – down a telephone line. Unlike Menotti’s The Telephone, however, rather than comic distraction, Poulenc’s phone is a medium of miscommunication and romantic rejection, as the central character confesses her innermost terrors and needs, and throws her darkest fury at her lover, whom she suspects of having betrayed her for another, with a shocking final revelation of just how far her desperation has taken her. Poulenc composed a fully scored orchestral version, but La voix humaine is often performed with just its piano reduction – created and often performed by the composer himself – which only seems to add to the opera’s stark power.

Less than a decade later (astonishingly), but seeming to occupy another world altogether, came a trilogy of solo stage works from Peter Maxwell Davies, early experiments in grotesque neo-expressionism. His 1966 Revelation and Fall might be most memorable for its singer – clothed in a blood-red nun’s habit – screaming obscenities into a loudhailer, but his 1969 Eight Songs for a Mad King has made an indelible mark as a landmark work of music theatre.

Mad monarchs and jilted lovers
Is Eight Songs for a Mad King opera, though? With its small instrumental ensemble, its solo singer and – crucially – its co-opting of its instrumentalists as performers in the dramatic proceedings, it probably belongs more naturally in the then emerging realm of music theatre. But, in a similar way to Erwartung, it takes us deep inside the mind of its protagonist – in this case, none other than King George III – and spins a developing storyline from the monarch’s increasingly deranged utterances.

Maxwell Davies followed up his one-man royal musical portrait with a one-woman non-aristocratic equivalent in 1974. Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot – much less well known than its predecessor – charts the descent into madness of Australian Eliza Donnithorne, who, jilted on her wedding day, immediately became a recluse, wearing her wedding dress for the rest of her life, and guarding her slowly rotting wedding cake in her bedroom.

If she sounds a familiar figure, she was indeed the inspiration behind Dickens’ Miss Havisham – who, incidentally, got a solo opera all to herself in the form of Dominick Argento’s 1981 Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night, a monodrama extracted from his multi-character opera Miss Havisham’s Fire.

Written around the same time, and finding some light and hope amid the darkness, Hans Werner Henze’s El cimarrón is not only a solo opera, but also one that scales its instrumental forces right back – to just guitar, flute and percussion. Henze wrote it in 1969-70 while on a teaching assignment in Cuba, and his solo baritone plays Esteban Montejo, a runaway slave who recounts what amounts to a history of the island, from a harrowing existence working on a sugar plantation, through a hermit’s life and war against the Spanish, to the rise of the Castro government. It’s a powerful political work of defiance and resilience, entirely in line with Henze’s unapologetically Marxist beliefs, but its themes have stood the test of time, too: a 2019 production at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was roundly praised, and Opera Philadelphia has it scheduled for live performances this coming Autumn.

So yes, there’s a lot of misery and despair among these intimate operas. And in many ways, that’s hardly surprising. In its focus and intensity, it’s a form that lends itself naturally to extreme psychological states – often on the edge of madness, as we’ve seen – or to the forensic examination of personalities and relationships. It’s also a form that came into its own in the early 20th century, a time when modernist artists were showing a particular interest in our internal lives, our traumas and our terrors. It’s hard to know which came first, of course, but there’s no doubt that those searching themes found a fruitful outlet in the intensity of intimate opera.

Battles of the sexes
But there’s a far lighter side, too, especially if we look back a couple of centuries to early examples of opera on a miniature scale. Then, a clutch of two-handers poked riotous fun at dysfunctional romantic couples using larger-than-life characters – a tradition into which Menotti’s rather more sophisticated The Telephone fitted perfectly.

Just take Telemann’s Pimpinone, for example – or, to give it its full title, The Unequal Marriage Between Vespetta and Pimpinone, or, The Domineering Chambermaid. Which tells you more or less all you need to know. First performed in 1725 as light relief between the acts of Telemann’s adaptation of Handel’s Tamerlano, it presents a preposterous plot in which cunning chambermaid Vespetta (literally, little wasp) wheedles her way into the affections of her rich, vain employer Pimpinone – who, when the couple finally marry, finds all aspects of his life and wealth expropriated by his erstwhile employee.

You may spot a theme emerging. Just eight years later, Pergolesi unveiled his La serva padrona (usually translated as ‘The Servant Turned Mistress’), originally intended as light relief between the acts of his own opera seria Il prigionier superbo. In it, cunning Serpina (literally, little snake – sound familiar?) manages to trick her way into marriage with her master Uberto – who, once hitched, realises he’s loved her all along.

Both these operas’ tales of feminine guile might strike us as being very much of their time, but there’s a lot to enjoy in their effortless, genuinely affecting music. Indeed, with its everyday characters, its vivid characterisation and its authentic emotion, La serva padrona proved a big hit across Europe, exerting a huge influence over the grander-scale Italian opere buffe and French opéras comiques that followed it – and provoking, in fact, Paris’ famous Querelle des bouffons, between rival factions supporting (respectively) French and Italian opera, headed by the King and Queen.

Secret addictions
Jump forward to the start of the 20th century, and you’ll discover another, rather more sophisticated comic two-hander on marital machinations. Susanna’s Secret by Wolf-Ferrari was memorably staged by Scottish Opera at the 2019 Lammermuir Festival (alongside another intimate two-hander, Mascagni’s sumptuous Zanetto), and concerns nervy Count Gil’s worries that his wife, the eponymous Susanna, may be having an affair after he smells cigarette smoke on her clothes, only to uncover her secret addiction.

It’s a paper-thin plot, admittedly, but again, what matters is the tight focus on the ups and downs of the couple’s relationship – and, in this case, Wolf-Ferrari’s sensuous music, used most notably to accompany Susanna’s much-longed-for drag.

A relationship of a very different kind, however, is the subject of Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1897 two-hander Mozart and Salieri, which uses a libretto taken virtually verbatim from Pushkin’s 1830 verse drama of the same name to tell of tormented Salieri’s attempts to poison Mozart out of jealously for the younger composer’s greater genius. It’s a remarkable creation, a work of severe beauty that’s a world away from Rimsky-Korsakov’s lavishly orchestrated fairytale operas. Here, he creates an operatic world that’s small in scale but intense in focus, and one that incorporates quotations from Mozart’s Requiem and Don Giovanni in a searching meditation on guilt and genius. Incidentally, there’s no specific connection with Peter Schaffer’s 1979 play Amadeus, nor Miloš Forman’s 1984 film of it, save that Schaffer took his initial inspiration from Pushkin.

An unlikely collaboration
Let’s finish, however, back in the intensity of the world of solo operas, and with one of the most abstract and enigmatic of them all. Morton Feldman’s Neither – a solo work for soprano and huge orchestra that sets an opaque 16-line text by Samuel Beckett – is, admittedly, barely an opera at all. Yet it feels in many ways like the continuation of a line begun by Schoenberg, and carried forward by Poulenc and Maxwell Davies.

Feldman and Beckett met in Berlin in 1976, and clearly hit it off, deciding to collaborate on something – hardly an everyday occurrence for the famously fastidious, controlling writer. Discovering common ground in a mutual dislike of opera, they decided what they should create would be – well, an opera. A few weeks later, Beckett sent Feldman a handwritten card bearing 16 lines of cryptic text, not quite a poem, which he titled Neither. Feldman set them to expansive, swelling clouds of music across a vast orchestra, so rich that they sometimes even obscure the solo soprano, who’s instructed to sing at near inaudibility right at the top of her range. Is it an opera? Probably not, but several prominent directors – including Katie Mitchell and Romeo Castellucci – seem to think it is, delivering lavish staged productions in recent years.

This is just a brief, entirely inexhaustive round-up of operas on an intimate scale, of course. But even with this handful of examples of one- and two-voice works, it’s illuminating to consider the threads and themes that run through them, and the remarkable power that can be achieved by boiling opera down to its raw fundamentals. While they might not offer the most lavish, sumptuous experiences you’ll encounter in an opera house, they surely provide some of the most intense.

David Kettle is Scottish Opera’s Programme Editor. He is also a music critic for The Scotsman and The Daily Telegraph, and has written about music for a broad range of publications including Classical Music, The Strad, The List, The Times and BBC Music Magazine.