Poul Ruders says of his vividly imaginative opera that he composed it ‘as though I were directing a film’. Precisely: it is divided into 44 scenes, some very short, several incorporating flashbacks in which present and past sometimes appear simultaneously. The opera’s ‘present’ is the not too distant future, a hideous fundamentalist autocracy in which women have no rights, not even to read and write, and those of them convicted of ‘gender treachery’ (adultery, second marriage, contraception, abortion) are compelled to become ‘Handmaids’, ritually impregnated by the husbands of childless women. The central character, Offred (‘Of Fred’ – the name of the man whose property she now is), is portrayed by two singers: her present, brainwashed and imperfectly remembering self, and Offred as she was in ‘Time Before’, happily married (though as her husband’s second wife a ‘gender traitor’ to the new order) with a five-year-old daughter. The opera, based on Margaret Atwood’s novel, depicts the brutal totalitarianism of ‘Time Now’, Offred’s relationship with the Commander (Fred) and his alarming wife, her longing for her dimly remembered husband and child and her enlistment in a sort of resistance group. But it is in the very nature of the plot that we never learn her ultimate fate.
It is also in the plot’s nature that it needs a great variety of types of music, as we move from past to present, from the grim rituals of Time Now to Offred’s memories of Time Before. Ambiguous music, too, since in this shadowy, threatening world things are often not what they seem. Ruders’ great achievement is to provide that variety and ambiguity from within the resources of his own style; in particular, he balances on the tightrope from tonality to atonality with great skill. The rituals of the Handmaids are accompanied by simple, chorale-like chants with ‘minimalist’ accompaniment, but any suspicion that Ruders is equating tonality with evil and atonality or extended tonality with good is soon contradicted by a quite different use of quasi-minimalism in the scenes from Offred’s past. There are similarly several types of lyricism: one heard, for example, in an aria for Offred, another in the menacing instructions of the Handmaids’ supervisor Lydia. But neither can be simply classified as ‘tonal’ or ‘atonal’; to call them respectively ‘warm’ and ‘cold’ would be closer. In the same way references to the hymn Amazing Grace, associated with the Commander’s wife Serena Joy (formerly a Gospel singer), can be in context either nostalgic or deeply sinister. The most striking passage in the score is a duet for the two Offreds in which both voices seem to be yearning for a tonal resolution – probably in D – but can no'