The libretto by Michael Hastings describes an imaginary encounter between the Dadaist/ Merz artist Kurt Schwitters and a boy named Michael at the end of the Second World War. Schwitters and the boy engage in an undignified squabble over a discarded bus-ticket which Michael wants for his collection and the artist needs for inclusion in a collage. On a later occasion they meet at a bus-stop when the elderly artist is taken ill and we discover that his suitcase is full of vegetables. Schwitters explains ‘a few things I collect beside bus tickets./ Sometimes I collect hunger and cold./And I’m partial to a bit of old age, and poverty.’ Michael begins to feel sympathy for the old man and during a subsequent meeting gains an insight into the ghosts that haunt Schwitters with fears of imprisonment and deportation. At one point a bus garage evokes a prison camp in Schwitters’s mind. When Michael brings him home for tea, the boy’s mother, who hates Germans because her husband was killed by a doodlebug, recognises that the artist is ‘diff’rent’ and also a victim of the Nazis. She forms a friendship with him, skilfully deflecting his attempts to put the relationship on a less chaste basis. After the turmoil of the war and their bereavement, mother and son hope to see the re-establishment of orderliness, while the artist remains committed to his creed of cultural sedition. Near the end Schwitters comments to Michael, ‘You look around and hate/the chaos and want to put/everything back in order…/I look around and see/chaos, and I love it’.

The opera opens impressively, with a passage in which a cello melody and vibraphone chords vividly evoke the damp, greyish-brown light of austerity-era London. From there on I felt that the first act went downhill musically. I am not convinced that any composer has solved the problem of setting mundane conversation (many simply ignore it) and as Hastings begins to sketch the context and direction of the relationship between Kurt and Michael, the music often seems to assume the role of rhubarbing extras. In the second act, however, Nyman gets into his stride, as he evokes both the atmosphere of daily life and the popular music which helped brighten it up. The rather jarring changes of gear in the first act are superseded by convincingly managed modulations of mood and style, and there are moments of guerilla poignancy, as when Schwitters, pleading for the ticket Michael holds, says, ‘you have so much of so many things/You have all these futures without misgivings’. All three singers turn in commendable performances, and one has to admire Graham-Hall for his realisation of two sound-poems conjuring a sneeze and a doodlebug.