Interview, George Benjamin: Picture a Day Like This

Picture a Day Like This is the fourth collaboration between Sir George Benjamin and Martin Crimp, whose acclaimed partnership produced Written on Skin, Lessons in Love and Violence, and Into the Little Hill. The sixty-minute opera is cast in seven scenes and scored for five voices and twenty-two instrumentalists. It premiered at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2023, with the composer conducting.

Just back from the premiere in Aix in the midst of preparing scores for his summer tours, George kindly spoke with me about the opera. Read the interview with George below.

A limited edition hardback score for the opera is also available now

You can find all of George Benjamin's sheet music here

Thanks so much for speaking with me. How did the premiere in Aix go?

Well, there are always challenges in opera; like our lead singer having a bad virus for the complete week prior to the premiere. That was very unfortunate but she came back on the day itself and the performances really went well, and it was a very, very happy and pleasant experience. It is a wonderful festival. I have been there several times now; Written on Skin was premiered there eleven years ago.

Could tell me a little bit about the story behind the opera?

It's basically one ancient story which surfaced at the time of Alexander the Great and his army, as he went further and further east and encountered the beginnings of Buddhism over two and a half thousand years ago. It's a story which has circulated in the West for a long time in numerous different guises. It is the idea of a challenge being set for someone to find a completely happy person on earth, and to gain from that if they discover that person, with the quest usually not ending in complete success.

My longtime collaborator, Martin Crimp, has set this story as a woman who has lost her young child and is told that the child can come back to life if she can find in the world one truly happy person and take a button from their shirt. In a sort of make-believe world, she goes on a very swift journey and encounters a variety of people who initially seem to be contented. When she spends a little bit of time with them it turns out that things aren't so simple. Then she has one crucially profound encounter at the end of the work which leads to the conclusion.

I really enjoy the fusion of fantasy and surrealism with devastating human emotions like grief and loss often found in your operas. What attracts you to this kind of storytelling?

It seems to me that anything that Martin writes just seems to spark music within me to a very surprising degree. My rate of composition multiplies considerably when I work on the operas that we create together. The last two operas were not entirely free of fantasy and not entirely realistic, but they were psychosexual dramas of a decidedly tragic character. We both decided we wanted to go in a different direction with this piece.

This piece is a quest in which the central woman encounters a wide variety of people each in their own little bubbles. And there's not much connection between them, except that of contrast, and the overall theme behind the whole opera. So it was a very different structure, a very different form, and also in a variety of different moods. And that I think may have been refreshing for both of us.

You mentioned bubbles there; was this composed during lockdowns by any chance?

Actually, no. The work I was engaged in during lockdown in the COVID crisis was my Concerto for Orchestra; a piece that was written, like this opera, for my beloved friends in the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. I began work on this opera very shortly after finishing that orchestral piece. So I think by then the main lockdowns were over, but the musical world was still decimated at that point. In a strange way, my life while composing is quite similar to the seclusion everybody had to endure during lockdowns because I keep myself very much to myself and bury myself in my work to the exclusion almost of anything else. But it wasn't a direct response. Who knows if there's any element in the piece that is related to what we all experienced?

How did you contrast the five different characters, and how is that portrayed in your music?

Gosh. Well, the choice of singers, the register, and the character of the singers. There are five singers; two of them have double roles. Like always, I got to know the singers before I wrote the opera and shaped my vocal lines directly into their capacities and their talents. The text demands a great degree of diversity and I simply use what tools I have at my disposition and my imagination to give each scene a very distinctive tone, sound world, character, personality, tempo, pacing, and colouring. For instance, the first of the big scenes is a pair of lovers. The woman encounters them, and they seem very deeply in love, but it turns out they're not. There's a major problem and in front of her and their relationship falls apart.

There's a degree of comedy in that, sad though it is. The vocal writing is very elaborate and melismatic at the beginning of the scene, where they're professing their love to each other, and I accompany that with a very strange sound of two tenor recorders, a bass recorder, a bass flute, and a bass clarinet; a very hollow windy strange sound which then mutates as the scene gets more active and darker.

In the following scene, however, the woman encounters an artisan who is a much more frightening person. His contentment comes from the drugs that he's given to repress his suicidal and appalling misery. This musically is set for baritone, so it's much lower in register. The two previous lovers were a countertenor and a high soprano. As this scene is set for baritone, the musical world it inhabits is really, very, very far away from that. The tessitura in which, not only the voice, but the orchestra lives, is much darker. The ingredients of the harmony are very strange, and contrasting with that of the previous scene. And will be with the following scene also.

Of course, if it was just a series of completely separate bubbles with no connection, it wouldn't make a piece. So the challenge was at the same time to have this degree of diversity, but equally to have a musical path through which the woman follows, and that the world follows, to give it a sense of unity and completeness as well. So that was at the back of my mind, continuously trying to balance the desire for integrity, unity, and harmonic underpinning while at the same time at the surface showing great degrees of diversity.

How did these particular singers affect the writing of your opera, and how did you tailor your writing to suit them?

They affected things, very, very considerably: their talents; the details of their voice; where they have registral changes; how high or low they can go; how strong certain areas of their voices are; where their weaknesses might be; where the challenges are; the things that they don't like etc. All of that informs me.

I give you one specific example. The baritone, a young American, John Brancy, came to work with me and we played, as I always do, some lieder, and then I would ask him lots of questions and take notes. Curiously he asked to come back the next day, which no one has ever asked. And while he was warming up the next morning downstairs, I heard him do something extraordinary. He was taking his voice through exercises and went from the lowest note of his voice, which is quite a low baritone B-flat, and without any breakage at all in the line, he went up to around the top E of the violin. So almost two and a half octaves higher. I had never heard anybody do that so softly and without any tension or vibrato. I immediately ran down. I said: "What are you doing? Come to the piano!" and I started playing notes for him to sing.

I hadn't yet started the opera, and the thought occurred to me, "This person is going to have to play someone who is on drugs and has psychotic tendencies. This extraordinary capacity to sing with such purity and beauty than your average baritone, I must use that". And so I did. So that encounter was extremely exciting for my ear and directly inspired the way that I wrote. It's somewhat uncanny and the question remains in my mind: who else in the world will be able to do this?

You worked with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra on this project. I believe this year is their 25th anniversary? Was the opera written for them?

Yes, this was also the 70th anniversary of the Aix festival. This was written for them and with them in mind, as Written on Skin and my Concerto for Orchestra were. There are many ensembles that I love here and across the world, but the Mahler Chamber Orchestra has become extremely close to me. We've done a lot of projects together in the last decade. Only this spring we took my previous large-scale opera Lessons in Love and Violence on tour in Germany and Belgium with a fantastic cast.

They have been incredibly loyal and supportive of me and my work. I have to say that in Aix they played it so, so beautifully. I really couldn't have asked for more.

Why do you choose Aix to premiere your operas?

It is the best opera festival in the world and certainly, there's an awful lot to recommend it. The audience is a huge varied age. Absolutely not snobbish. Everybody performing there gives it their absolute best. There were some fantastic concerts and performances that I saw. Amongst them was perhaps the best Wozzeck I've ever seen conducted by Simon Rattle. I went to that twice. It was really breathtaking.

I was kept very busy because we had two open dress rehearsals, nine performances of my opera, and I had to conduct a very challenging concert with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra beside this, and all within two weeks. So there were some productions that I was sadly unable to get to. But I also heard the three Stravinsky ballets played by the Orchestra de Paris. My word, the performances were marvellous.

It's a wonderful, wonderful festival and everybody involved in the festival from the top of the management down to every aspect of the organisation seemed to be so devoted to the task in hand, it's quite touching to see things dealt with such technical aplomb and enthusiasm.

How important is it for you to conduct and be involved in the premiere yourself?

It's not really important. But I enjoy it greatly and there's one thing that I'm particularly grateful for. I have just sent my excellent publisher [Faber Music] a list of 150 small tiny alterations in the score: different types of mute; different types of articulation; changes in dynamics; changes in slurs; changes in bowing; things that I was able at great speed to try out and experiment with in front of the orchestra. If someone else had been conducting it, it wouldn't have been feasible. And that's one aspect that I particularly value. It allows me to polish the last stages of composition and just get the fine detail completely right. I also enjoy it. I love the immersive character of opera, instead of a concert where you have three days of rehearsal and then it's over.

I really enjoy the social aspect of making music with such wonderful singers, a marvellous directorial team, and a superb orchestra. The process of composition is quite lonely, solitary, and unremittingly intense, so it is a fantastic antidote after 18 months of writing to participate and to make music with others.

Even as a child at the age of seven or nine, I was a performer. I played the piano, and I performed theatre music that I wrote for plays at school at a very young age. So it's in my bones; to deprive myself of this entirely would be sad for me. As much as I love to hear others perform my music at a high level, it's a real thrill for me in fact, I like to be a participator.

I also wanted to ask about your collaboration with Martin Crimp. What do you think it is that makes your pairing so successful? Why do you think you work so well together?

Well by the time that I met him, I'd been looking for so long for a collaborator that I'd given up. Three years before I said I was never going to write an opera, with great regret. I love opera above all other art forms. So the the initial meeting with him was a great surprise, and I felt within half an hour of the lunch we shared together: this is someone I can work with.  And it does seem to have worked. We have now done four pieces together. There's several things we share in some aspects of our characters: we're both secretive; we're both hyper-interested in tiny details, obsessive about it even; and we're both fascinated by form and structure, even in an abstract sense. There's lots of differences too which provide a positive tension between us as well.

We don't think the same way, and he's enriched my mind, let alone my composing. I think a very crucial thing is that he adores music. He's a very fine pianist himself; his whole family plays instruments. I feel in a way while I'm writing these works, that I'm aiming them at him. When he first arrived in Aix this year, and he heard the singers and the orchestra together, I was able to see very quickly what it meant to him, to have his words treated and set this way.

It's something that gives some joy. As for what he writes. It's like electric currents for me. The style is strange, unearthly, full of passion, and full of intensity, but artificial and not naturalistic. So there is absolutely no question that he has absolutely transformed me as a composer and allowed me to realise, what was always a dream. So I'm indescribably grateful to him.

How do the collaborations tend to come about?

Usually, the first person to move is the person who commissions the work. Then we have to find a subject. Martin does a lot of research and we both do a lot of reading, going down endless cul-de-sacs not knowing where we're going. That process can take a year until we become convinced that something is right.

We talk a lot and share ideas, then he suddenly disappears and I don't hear from him for six to nine months until through the letterbox a brown envelope arrives. I open it and it's 20, 30, 40 pages of text written for me. As you can imagine that is a thrilling and daunting moment. Then it's my turn; for the next two to three years I'll be writing the music and increasingly being in contact with him during the process.

And we actually like each other. Which is not essential, but it's a great bonus as well!