Introducing Imago: a Bohème for the digital age

It has all the hallmarks of being something rather unusual. Tomorrow night, Glyndebourne, better known as the operatic shrine of high summer, stages the world premiere of an opera worlds away from, say, the French Baroque delights of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie, Richard Strauss’s more contemporary Ariadne auf Naxos, or Britten’s searing Billy Budd, all of which will form part of the formal summer fare in the coming months.

Imago is something completely different. A brand new opera for the internet age by the composer Orlando Gough, also known as director of The Shout, an unusual and highly-praised choir.

‘What if you could live a second life, look the way you want to look and be whoever you wanted to be?’ That’s the question Glyndebourne poses – and Imago is the operatic answer to Second Life and The Sims. It’s set in a care home, where 80-year-old Elizabeth has gone to die. Andy, an occupational therapist who visits the home, has devised a type of computer game where the inmates can wear a helmet and launch their imago (what they call their avatar) and project themselves into the online world in any guise they choose.

The work is being staged as part of Glyndebourne’s ‘community’ programme. But if you speak of ‘community opera’ you run the risk of boring the pants off your potential audience before they have even reached the auditorium. And one thing Imago is not going to be is boring.

Glyndebourne offers a unique experience. In high summer yes – the nature of the venue and its surroundings, the production values and attention to detail, the generally careful casting, can all contribute to an operatic experience to be savoured (albeit ticket prices up to £250 and the formal dress code are not everyone’s glass of champagne). But out of season too. And rehearsals for tomorrow night have been bringing song and dance to Glyndebourne’s dark winter for months! As Imago librettist Stephen Plaice explained: ‘The great thing about this slot is that Glyndebourne is very unlike other theatres. It’s dark from after the tour leaves around October until the following May. So there has always been this facility here for a production and the education and community projects have moved in. With other opera houses that are operating all the year round it would be much more difficult.’

I spent a day with the production team at Glyndebourne watching Imago being put together and talking to the creative team, as well as discovering that an imago is actually the final biological stage of the fully-developed butterfly, after the caterpillar, and the crysalis.

Stephen Plaice, librettist 

‘The commission was to come up with an idea for a community opera that somehow represented the digital age. Composer Orlando Gough, director Susannah Waters and I had all been experiencing the dilemma parents face about how much access to new technology we wanted to give to our kids. Susannah’s and mine are younger or early teenage and Orlando’s now university age. But we’d all had that experience of growing up with the first fully digital generation rather than the bridging generation like our own. We had this in common. But what we also had in common, at the other end of the spectrum, was that we’d each been dealing with elderly relatives, either parents or aunts or uncles, in the care system.

‘So we wanted to find a subject that embraced both ends of the age spectrum so that this wouldn’t just be a youth opera but would genuinely have people from all ages of life. We’ve not really seen that done before in the community operas.

‘Susannah’s mother had gone into care and was probably beginning to suffer from some dementia. Apparently she felt that she was 18 again – and almost fell in love, if you like, with her carer. The idea that an elderly person could feel and experience this youthful possibility of love and romance, that it was still there for someone in her eighties, felt very operatic to us. 

‘I decided to introduce the occupational therapist, who brings in an online system rather like the games you get today, like Second Life and The Sims, where you can launch a completely other personality, an avatar, or as we call it in the opera an imago, into the online world, where you can live vicariously – literally a second life in the online world.

‘Our central character, Elizabeth [played by Jean Rigby, who has been a Glyndebourne stalwart for 30 years], launches her 18-year-old imago Lisette, [played by Joanna Songi, memorable as Flora in The Turn of the Screw] into this game. Meanwhile, unbeknown to the therapist who has developed the system, his teenage son has accessed it and projected his own imago. Rufus is actually 15, but he makes his imago, Gulliver, a bit older – about 19.

‘So Rufus projects Gulliver into the online world and, of course, he and Lisette meet and fall in love. But one of the rules of the game is anonymity. You’re not allowed to reveal who your host is. So what we have is the spirit, if you like, of an 80-year-old in love with the spirit of a 15-year-old, without either of them having any idea that that’s the set-up!

‘The online Imago world is made up of all sorts of different environments. So it gives us a great palette to play with operatically because the imagos can choose to go, say, to the pleasure dome or a more relaxing Mediterranean harbour. They can go to the casino or to a political demonstration and so on. You have all these options available to the two protagonists, who follow each other around through those environments as their online relationship develops.

‘But all the while you are touching back to the care home, as one aspect of the elderly patient’s experience, and into the home of the boy in the therapist’s family. 

‘And while the imaginative possibilities for Lisette are growing all the time as she experiences all these environments, her host Elizabeth is fading, she’s dying. So you have got one character who is just coming into life and another who is just going out. That’s why I describe it as a sort of Bohème for the digital age, because it’s fatally flawed. Lisette’s and Gulliver’s love can’t survive, simply because of the nature of one aging participant hosting one youthful one.

‘While I was working on this I did create an avatar for myself on Second Life and tried it out to see what it would be like. She was called Molly Remnant. I’d been reading a lot of Henry Fielding, Tom Jones or something like that, and the idea of a country girl coming to London appealed to me. There is some predatory activity out there, as I found.’

Is the concept of Imago to a degree encouraging people to adopt personnas which they might misuse?

‘It’s kind of covered, because the first person that Lisette meets is a woman called Annie and you think a sort of girly friendship is developing. But that character turns out to be a predator, who also appears in a different guise later on in the in the casino. I tried to present an even-handed picture of what the cyber experience of living vicariously through another character might be like.

‘And there’s an argument (it is called the Family Fugue, because Orlando has written it as a fugue), where the different elements of the therapist’s family – the two boys and their two parents – are actually having a sort of vocal argument about how much access they can have and whether they are old enough to do it. Their mother is completely against their getting involved in this kind of online activity with all its attendant risks. Their father, of course, because it’s his own creation, is saying this can be very good because it’s an educational tool. They all have a different perspective and that’s what creates the fugue. 

‘We didn’t want to say this was a bad activity. At the same time we didn’t say this is the way that you should lead your life, or this is the future. We are not presenting a fully rosy picture and saying you can imaginatively realise yourself online. And something else that preoccupies me is that the kind of external public space for children that we all used to enjoy is now seen as very dangerous. Instead, their friendships and interactions take place mainly from their own bedrooms. Personally I think that is quite a disturbing development in culture and in society. One work that was very much in my mind during the development of Imago was EM Forster’s When the Machine Stops, written in the early part of the 20th century, where he imagined a world where you were just in your room and everything was piped into that room and you never went outside. It was a kind of distopia. Now that seems quite foresightful, because that is the contemporary experience of many western children.

‘But one of the other rules of Imago, which Elizabeth herself doesn’t realise at first, is that once you have launched your imago it will increasingly develop its own independence from its host. So there becomes a kind of tension between Elizabeth and Lisette as the one feels the other is actually going away from her. It actually becomes like a kind of mother-daughter relationship in the piece. And Elizabeth starts to feel frustrated that she can’t contain Lisette.

‘It all sounds very wizzy and modern because of the subject matter, but underneath it all this is a traditional opera story. Just one that is fatally flawed. 

‘The show uses a lot of digital techniques, although oddly enough one of the techniques is Pepper’s Ghost, which is a Victorian invention, a sort of coup de thèatre where they were able through the angling of mirrors to put a person apparently on stage and then to make that character vanish instantly. So we think we’ve come a long way in the last 100 and more years, but in fact we are still attempting to refine perhaps the same sort of theatrical moments of excitement. 

‘Orlando is a great writer for the voice. Having run The Shout for so long, his sort of choral innovation is second to none amongst modern composers. I know where his strengths lie so I created a scene called ‘‘A capella Wedding’’, just before the opera’s climax, which is a whole wedding, including the wedding reception, and which is all a capella from the arrival of the guests.’

Orlando Gough, composer

‘The only other opera at all in this genre is probably Two Boys by Nico Muhly, because parts of that take place partly in the real world and partly in the digital world. But that is a study of abuse and this is very different.

‘For me Imago is really about the idea that at the age of 80 you can still fall in love and be full of regrets about things that you didn’t do in your life. What rings really true for me is that it’s the things you didn’t do that you regret not doing rather than the stupid stuff that you did. This opera is about getting a kind of second chance to do those things that you never quite managed to do the first time around.

‘I think it’s very ambiguous and will send you away questioning the whole idea of living through the digital world. The libretto is a really interesting mixture between quite naturalistic dialogue scenes and some very poetic songs. For me it was a matter of making sense of those two things together and making music which kind of amalgamated them, not dividing them into recitative and aria but making something which more organic than that. This is something I’d never really looked at before in writing an opera. The other big thing I was thinking about was how to distinguish the music of the real world and the music of the digital world and how they were going to interact with each other.

‘That turned out to be particularly interesting, because at first it was very tempting to make the music of the digital world really plastic and synthetic. But I came to the conclusion that in the end the kind of game you play in the digital world, because it’s a human invention, is not going to be so different from real life, not nearly as different as you’d expect. Obviously, if you create your own avatar in a digital game you can create a fantastic person who’s marvellous and brilliant and clever and can do all sorts of things. But in the end, the kind of interactions you have with other people in that world will be quite similar to the ones that you will in the real world. So in the end the relationship between the music of the digital world and the music of the real world are much closer than I’d imagined they would be at the start.

‘They are, I hope, different, and there’s something about the digital world which is very different from real life, to do with its ability to be very unpredictable and to shift shape very quickly, so that one moment you can be in one place doing one thing and a nanosecond later you can be somewhere else with a completely different lot of people doing something different and in a different time-frame. To that extent it’s very different, so I’ve tried to make the music in the digital world very slippery and unpredictable. But that ends up affecting the music in the real world as well, because the two boys that have been playing this game, it’s as if in the real world they are affected by what they’ve been doing in the digital world, which I believe surely happens. If you spend a lot of your time playing digital games, of course that’s going to spill over into your real life. That’s what this is all about for me, this very strange, unpredictable relationship between the two worlds.

‘And inside the digital world the music is very unpredictable and shifts shape a lot. Sometimes it’s almost pastiche, but never completely so. It sort of reminds one of certain kinds of music and moves very quickly from one to another.’

What were your musical influences for this?

‘There are certain kinds of pop music, which are very obvious. There’s a pop song which sounds a bit like a modern version of the Beach Boys. But there are other times when it actually sounds more like a John Adams opera. There are times when there are very obvious influences of certain kinds of world music. There’s a scene which is like a kind of Arab Spring protest scene, which is very influenced by Egyptian and Turkish music. So it’s actually got a very wide range of influences. The challenge for me was to make a coherent sense of it and also to make a situation in which you really cared about the main characters and really get involved with them, so that you didn’t think that these were just plastic, synthetic people and it doesn’t really matter what happened to them.’

Do you see the main characters as one personality or two?

‘It’s a good question. Elizabeth, an 80-year-old woman in the real world, creates, with some help, this avatar, an 18-year-old girl, Lisette, who is to some extent her, but who also has a mind of her own. That’s part of the point, that she starts to rebel against Elizabeth. So they are very definitely separate people. But they start in one way identical. When the imago is first created Elizabeth voice and Lisette’s voice are one. The imago gradually breaks away. It’s like cell division. It’s like something breaking off Elizabeth, almost like a clone. And then the young girl becomes more and more independent. So I would say they are definitely separate. But interestingly, at the end they kind of reunite in a rather nice way. But there are very definitely moments when Lisette is more like Elizabeth’s daughter, rebelling in the same way a teenage daughter might against her mother.

‘The young man in the digital world, Gulliver, is actually a very interesting case because he’s controlled by two different people at different times and therefore he, Gulliver, becomes a different person depending on who’s controlling him. He’s controlled both by 15-year-old Rufus and, at times, by his nine-year-old brother Rory. When Rory takes control Gulliver becomes a different person. So Gulliver is a very complex character – a good role, with a lot to think about when you’re playing it.

‘I don’t write enormously complex music, even if I’m writing for professionals, and I’m quite happy writing simple music. On the other hand, in this case I got very involved in trying to write a really good opera and the music doesn’t take many prisoners. But the chorus has had a lot of rehearsal time, so they’ve actually learnt some really quite difficult music. 

‘There’s quite a lot of unison writing, big tunes, but then there’s some much more intricate writing in eight parts and the chorus has the ‘‘A capella Wedding’’ scene all to themselves, which is on the face of it pure folly really! It’s so ridiculously challenging to do an a capella scene in an opera, particularly six or seven minutes of it, and it’s very intricate. There are a lot of solo lines, mostly taken by members of the chorus. But I love a capella music and Stephen wrote it there on purpose just to give me a chance to do this! The chorus really enjoys it too. It’s fun – and it’s curious that you very seldom get a capella music in operas. It’s fairly obvious to say, but opera is basically about singing and I’m really pleased with this scene. The libretto’s hilarious here also, so funny and so well-written and the music’s very energetic and should be really enjoyable. It’s placed very beautifully as the whole opera is winding up in tension and you get this temporary release with this very jolly scene before we wind the tension back up again for the climax. 

‘I have found writing Imago a real challenge. It was like climbing Mount Everest actually, without oxygen. I’ve never written such a long piece in my life. I raced through the first act. I think I wrote it without getting too hung up about it. It seemed quite easy. But by the time I came to Act 2 I was very concerned about making sense of all the themes that I’d set up and making sure that I was keeping all the balls in the air. In a way it should have been easy because I’d written all the themes. I had them all there to use. I had all the ingredients. And the orchestrating was a huge job, which I think I underestimated!

‘The orchestra is half professionals and half teenagers and the teenagers are really good. We were ruthless about selecting them. The orchestra has a strange construction. There are no brass instruments in it. For some reason which I absolutely can’t put my finger on I decided to augment the woodwind section hugely – so there are lots of saxophones – and to have no brass. So it has a very very particular sound, a lot of tuned percussion, but no brass. Perhaps it was a subconscious desire to make the opera cohere a bit more.

‘I’m very influenced by folk music and world music and that’s always I think very obviously present in the music. And it sometimes shades over into pop music and sometimes into what you might call contemporary classical. But it’s always kind of hovering around folk music. And that feels to me a good basis for writing a community opera, because it’s a kind of folk occasion in the way that it’s done partly by amateur people. 

‘The good thing about a ‘‘community opera’’ is that it gives aspiring professional musicians and amateurs of all kinds a chance to find out what it’s like actually to be in an opera and that’s a fantastic opportunity, and in this case the idea is to make it so good that nobody knows the difference.

‘In this opera, however, Stephen and I had also to invent the rules of this online game we’d created – and make sure that the rules worked. So it was a bit like inventing a video game as we were going along and I would ring him up and go, surely the rule is that you have to do this, wait a minute is this right? So we were kind of rewriting that as we went along! But I’ve never been a great player of computer games. So we kind of made it up ourselves. And there is a danger, let’s face it, that this will turn out to a piece written by two middle-aged men: we may have fallen into the trap of writing what we think is going on and it’s not going on at all!’

Susannah Waters, director

‘I told Stephen and Orlando the anecdote of how this strange thing happened with my mum the year before she died. She fell very deeply in love with one of her male carers and told me how she’d never thought she would feel like this again, how she felt like she was 25 again. The feelings were the same. So we were talking about that. And I also have a very good friend who has done a lot of photography work on the use of gaming for post-traumatic stress with soldiers who have served in Iraq. The army and people like that are recruiting gamers to do a lot of this therapeutic work. They also use it in not such nice ways. But gamers are now moving into other fields, and there are good and bad things about it.

‘So we thought we could make a kind of palliative. Would there be a game that could be brought into a care home in a sort of palliative way, as a social activity to pass the time, but also in terms of some kind of psychiatric therapeutic benefit, which is what the programmer believes in our story. He so much wants it to be a great thing that he’s a little bit blindly optimistic about it and doesn’t listen to other people.

‘But I’m not a gamer at all. When we started talking about design, I started looking at things like Second Life and The Sims. We went and looked just graphically in terms of the design and luckily I came in one day and went, ‘‘This is just killing me, I hate the look of these things. I hate it. Can we not try and reproduce that!’’

‘So we tried to go much more whimsical. The kids have seen computer games, so why reproduce them on the stage? So we are using all kinds of different graphics and trying to be much more imaginative and not feel we have to copy.

‘What’s wonderful about this is that it has exponentially 50 times the effect of any of those ghettoized education projects because you have amateur people working side by side with professionals, not only professional singers but professional stage management and a professional creative team. What they learn in a day of that, what they experience in a day of that, working next to someone like Jean Rigby with her decades of experience, you just literally see their shoulders  raise. You see them actually, viscerally almost, physically experiencing what Jean is doing physically and the amount of energy it takes and the kind of detail.

‘We had a stagger-through of the whole show. In earlier rehearsals they’d seen Jean getting music wrong, but now it’s happening. Because she’s a pro she’s filling in so many details, she’s filling in all the life in between her notes. I said to the youngsters, if you’re really interested in being a singer, being a part of this, watch her! Then they can see that it’s not that the pro starts out brilliant, knowing all her music, whatever. The difference, what takes them further, is this kind of detailed work that they would never get on their own.

‘Equally, what we hadn’t anticipated because we did it for the story, is seeing all these ages working together and giving this project a whole different feel. It’s all about the amount of resources Glyndebourne puts into these community projects once every three years. The budget for this was about £500,000 all in, smaller than a festival show would have, but artistically, and from the stage management, from all of them, you have no sense that this is any less important a show to them.

‘Orlando’s music is at its best with the widest range of voices and he really comes alive when he has to write music for 90 people! And he has written in dozens of individual solo lines for members of the chorus!’ 

Jean Rigby, plays Elizabeth

A Glyndebourne stalwart for 30 years, since the mid-eighties, here she plays wheelchair-bound 80-year-old Elizabeth.

‘It’s quite a challenge. I’ve never played such an old role. It is not a massive singing role, though I’m on stage in my wheelchair for most of the opera, but I have some wonderful moments. The music is quite difficult and tricky. Orlando aptly described it as ‘‘slippery’’. That’s a very good description! It’s very beautiful. A couple of the scenes are just wonderful and the libretto is beautiful. 

‘Elizabeth is lonely, obviously. She is frustrated, angry, vulnerable. And it transpires that she actually lost the love of her life in a motorbike accident... when she was 18! So I think that’s why she takes the young girl, her imago Lisette, back to the age of 18 – to relive her youth and, maybe, refind and rekindle that love, or find that feeling of love. The words are so beautiful: ‘‘The girl that lives forever never dies inside.’’

‘I love listening to some of the choruses, because I’m not involved in them so I can hear them and I’m on stage with them. You saw us rehearsing the pleasure dome scene. And the second scene, at the station, is wonderful. It’s very busy and all very rhythmic. The chorus are dodging. Imagine Victoria Station at rush hour. Dodging people. It’s fantastic and they are all doing this wonderful choreography to it as well.

‘And the casino in Act 2 has wonderful music. All these chorus scenes are really catchy. I think people will be tapping and become quite involved in it. The words are beautifully set. And the ‘‘A capella Wedding’’ is quite ingenious!

‘Lisette says, ‘‘Oh my god, my host, she wants me to get married!’’ And then Lisette marries Gulliver. The music creates the themes brilliantly. It is all very very atmospheric.

Joanna Songi, Lisette

‘As Elizabeth’s avatar I see myself as being essentially her character, but as if I’ve never experienced anything so I can make all the mistakes. You know how 18-year-olds go out and their mothers say, ‘‘You know you shouldn’t do that,’’ because their mothers have lived through it and know that it’s a bad idea. But in a way Elizabeth experiences some of the things that she never got to when she was actually living her own life. She gets given like a new lease of life!

‘I’ve not played online games myself so I asked my little brother what these interactive games are like! And I signed up for a couple of online games just to see. It’s a completely different world from the one I’m used to. A friend told me she had a friend who used to come to the pub with her and who actually stopped going to the pub with this group of friends because she was going on it in this alternate life online. It took over to that extent that she didn’t go out in the real world! That’s all wrong. But I can see that for someone in a care home, who can’t go out,this can be such a freeing experience, to go so freely around the world.’

The world premiere of Imago by Orlando Gough is at Glyndebourne tomorrow and runs till Saturday. It is a co-commission with Scottish Opera 

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