Est 1923

Andriessen Rosa: The Death of a Composer

Music that switches mood from relative austerity to tempered ferocity, often without warning. The sex and violence are in the words as well as the music

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Louis Andriessen

Genre:

Opera

Label: Nonesuch

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 112

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: 7559-79559-2

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Rosa: The Death of a Composer Louis Andriessen, Composer
Asko Ensemble
Christopher Gillett, Alcan, Tenor
Louis Andriessen, Composer
Lyndon Terracini, Juan Manuel de Rosa
Marie Angel, Blond Woman, Soprano
Marie Angel, Second Singer, Soprano
Marie Angel, Esmeralda, Soprano
Miranda Van Kralingen, Investigatrix
Miranda Van Kralingen, First Singer
Miranda Van Kralingen, Madame de Vries
Miranda Van Kralingen, Texan Whore
Phyllis Blanford, Index Singer
Reinbert de Leeuw, Conductor
Roger Smeets, Cowboys, Baritone
Roger Smeets, Lully, Baritone
Schönberg Ensemble
Rosa: The Death of a Composer, or ‘A Horse Drama’, gives us blood on the stable floor, dried, ominous and darkly crusted with sexual symbolism. Louis Andriessen’s pile- driving score is a musical enactment related by birth to Stravinsky, though it’s probably nearer in spirit to rock, jazz and Broadway. I love Rosa’s lack of compromise, its snorting aggression – especially at 8'45'' into the Seventh Scene where angular rhythms suddenly transform to a wild canter. The mythical Uruguayan composer Juan Manuel de Rosa rides bareback as his hapless fiancee moans, in one of her various guises, of how Juan loves horses more than he loves her. She has already confessed that she ‘pretends to be a horse to amuse his [Juan’s] lechery’ – and if that shocks you, then brace yourself for a feast of debauchery, violence and black humour.
When annotator Greg Sandow writes that ‘Rosa has an urgency you won’t find in most new operas’, he’s not kidding. Bellini it certainly isn’t, though Esmeralda’s music at the beginning of scene 7 comes perilously close to being an aria. Film director Peter Greenaway’s tale of ‘a melodramatic conspiracy against composers’ takes Anton Webern, who was shot by an American soldier at the end of the Second World War, as its starting point. Indeed, we’re told that Rosa’s corpse was found naked ‘save for his hat … his spectacles … [and] his Havana cigar’. These Webernian props even extend to the near-parallel of Rosa’s cowboy killers. In a bizarre ninth scene ritual, the composers Alkan and Lully (two further hostages to misfortune) marry fiancee and corpse ‘till death parts’ them. Charming.
Andriessen’s band comprises woodwinds, brass, synthesizers, percussion and a few amplified strings. The style recalls the bold contrasts in, say, De materie, with tough-fisted rhythms (mostly jagged and irregular) and stark fortissimo chords. The overture is typically confrontational but some of the most powerful music in the score occurs at the end of scene 4 (from around 9'48'' on track 5, disc 1) where, in true murder-mystery fashion, a missing clue thwarts the drama’s successful resolution. Heavy Blues settle among the opening pages of the fifth scene, and the eleventh opens to a Morricone-style solo harmonica, where the hub of the theme reflects another of Andriessen’s obsessions. It’s a certain Brahms Waltz (from Op 39, as it happens) that his sister used to hum in their childhood bedroom and that also crops up earlier on in the piece. Who would have thought sentimentality would figure in such a blatantly bestial context, but there you have it! The last scene is trailed by a raunchy, rock-style ‘Index Singer’ who opens by defining Abattoir (‘The location of the opera … A slaughterhouse’, etc) and gets as far as Gas, via the likes of Dump and Envy. She eventually makes an exit, but the printed text takes us all the way from Glass-Haired to Zig-Zag.
Rosa was premiered at the Netherlands Opera in 1994 and the performance under review is superb, though special mention should be made of soprano Marie Angel, a marvellous singer and a formidable vocal actress. Peter Greenaway’s libretto is erotic, often lyrical and profoundly ambiguous. Unusually, the words and synopsis complement each other: you read one, then study the other for further elucidation. But the music is pure Andriessen, blanched in the quieter music, and punch-drunk when the going gets hot. It’s a music of extremes. I adore it, but if you’re unsure, play a minute or so of the overture and the whole of scene 4 (10'36''-worth on disc 1, track 5). That’ll tell you all you need to know … more or less.'

Andriessen Rosa: The Death of a Composer

Rosa: The Death of a Composer

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