For composer Kate Soper, almost any musical resource – acoustic, electronic, audio, visual – is a possibility in a no-boundary sensibility that gives The Romance of the Rose an innovative form, communicative urgency and radical eccentricity. She draws on medieval-era poetry and music to explore 21st-century dilemmas, both concrete and intellectually abstract. The self-authored libretto is based on the Roman de la rose, written in the 13th century by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, a medieval French counterpart to Plato’s Symposium. Spiralling around the central image of the rose as a symbol of womanhood, the epic poem was described by one scholar as ‘an encyclopedia in disorder’, allowing Soper to launch an allegorical free-for-all that has one character fancifully asking, among other things, if it’s possible to have sex with a plant.

Songs, arias, soliloquies and spoken dialogue are presented with spare accompaniment from nine players, plus electronic mutations, all employed to characterise dream analysis, psychotherapy and lectures on love. Cool detachment is the predominating manner, though there are occasional episodes of manic hysteria.

‘Love is a mental illness afflicting its victims with distorted perception’, according to the allegorical character Lady Reason. ‘Love is a fraud, a hymn that’s fit for a junkyard!’ proclaims the character of Shame. ‘The first time I saw you’, adds Lady Reason, ‘my prefrontal cortex flooded with dopamine.’

Soper the librettist unleashes Soper the composer to create music that can be breathtakingly mercurial, with effects that are both exhilarating and torturous. Compositional tension is generated by medieval formality coming face to face with barely controlled modern chaos. Arias show Soper at her best with text-dictated rhythmic and melodic irregularities – sung by microphone-friendly voices that lie somewhere between operatic and vernacular vocal production.

Hearing the piece as a polished product of the recording studio (led with clinical clarity by fellow composer Eric Wubbels), one assumes that The Romance of the Rose isn’t meant to have a life on the stage. It feels complete in this sound-only medium, like a radio play. And yet the libretto has highly specific stage directions for fantastical scenic effects, potentially on a level with Die Frau ohne Schatten. But scenic elements aren’t likely to make up for narrative limitations of The Romance of the Rose, whose discussion is too tangential – and musical invention too discursive – to sustain a prologue, two acts and two epilogues. The conclusion – ‘We can’t fully know ourselves, and we can’t fully know each other’ – is reminiscent of those neurology publications that go to great lengths analysing common-sense topics.

The opera is best for listeners with no great attachment to medieval art, because as often as Soper speaks through the forms that have come down to us from troubadours, she also mocks them. And then there’s the booklet art by Julie Doucet in the dense, woodcut style of graphic novels: Soper’s allegorical humanoids are illustrated with prominent teeth and oblong heads (leaving less brain room). Having been recorded in 2023, The Romance of the Rose feels out of step in 2025. The stylised ugliness of the illustrations and the arch performance manner keeps you at a considerable distance – amid our present society that’s increasingly fractured and polarised. Maybe this opera is for a more playful era.