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Monster in the Maze
Community singers at the Berlin premiere of Was lauert da im Labyrinth on 20 June. Photograph: Monika Rittershaus
Community singers at the Berlin premiere of Was lauert da im Labyrinth on 20 June. Photograph: Monika Rittershaus

Monstrous fun: the community opera with a cast of hundreds

This article is more than 8 years old

Jonathan Dove’s Monster in the Maze involves a huge cast of professionals and amateurs, adults and children, and it’s being performed in three countries, in three languages. Can the Simons (Rattle conducting, and Halsey choral directing) tame the beast?

There are 350 singers on stage in the Philharmonie, Berlin. There are children, teenagers and adults. They are singing and acting their hearts out for Simon Rattle. The orchestra is made up partly of the Berlin Philharmonic and partly of students, many as young as 10. There are four horn-players whose feet don’t reach the floor. The music is by Jonathan Dove and Was lauert da im Labyrinth? (The Monster in the Maze) has been specially written to give as many people as possible the chance to perform within the hallowed walls of the Philharmonie.

Meanwhile, exactly the same scene is taking place in London where the same piece, in its English version, The Monster in the Maze, is being acted, sung and played by the full forces of the London Symphony Orchestra’s Discovery programme - the LSO Community Choir and Youth and Children’s Choirs in association with the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. They’re rehearsing for a performance at the Barbican on 5 July.

And a further 350 are hard at it in the heat of Provence at the Aix en Provence festival where the full resources of the recently built Grand Theatre de Provence have been given over to Le monstre du Labyrinthe for performances on 8 and 9 July.

With the exception of the two Simons (Rattle, and myself, Halsey, the choir director), the cast and the productions are completely different, as of course is the language – Jonathan Dove has set Alasdair Middleton’s English libretto in both German and French.

The work was semi-staged at Berlin’s Philharmonie. Photograph: Monika Rittershaus

Jonathan and I have been commuting between the three cities since January, overseeing choral rehearsals and meeting directors, designers and managements. More than 1,000 people from every walk of life and background are working together and each institution is buzzing. And each city is fascinated to know how the others are approaching our shared opera.

The piece sounds quite different, of course, in each of its three languages. The English in which the work was first composed fits the music best. The brilliant German translation maintains all the original charm and humour but needs to be sung very slightly slower because of the sheer number of consonants! (“beaten to pulp on the sand of the floor” becomes “grausam zerstampft zwischen Hufen und Sand”). The French version, the hardest to adapt to the English rhythms, feels much gentler but, again, works wonderfully.

London is semi-staging the piece with all the imagination it can muster in the comparatively confined spaces of the Barbican. The Philharmonie in Berlin is a more open space and so allowed a more elaborate although still concert-based staging for the premiere performances on 20 and 21 June. In Aix, the project is fully staged in the recently built Grand Theatre. Each version is wonderful in its own way.

Dove’s opera is the first of a series of annual commissioned community operas written to a brief set out by Berlin and London: 50 minutes, for a mix of professional and amateur players and singers, but with the accent on un-auditioned choirs: children, youth and adult. The model in the back of our minds is Britten’s Noyes Fludde – our project came out of a particularly successful production of Britten’s community opera that took place Berlin in 2013, and was followed by David Lang’s Crowd Out last year, a football-inspired performance for 1,000 people that took place in Birmingham, Berlin and London.

Monster in the Maze, Berlin Philharmonie
Monster in the Maze, Berlin Philharmonie. Photograph: Monika Rittershaus/PR

Ours is not a new idea, but it’s a mighty effective one. Resources might often be bigger abroad, but the ideas and leadership are often forged in the passionate but underfunded British education departments – the LSO and other British orchestras are market leaders in educational innovation. We have had to evangelise for music for a couple of generations already. We all believe in it, and nobody more than Simon Rattle.

Mind you, the idea of hundreds, even thousands of people singing goes back a long way. Haydn was inspired by the great Handel festivals with 900 people in the choir. He published his oratorios in three languages and expected what we know as The Creation to be performed in the mother tongue of its audience.

Dramatic, huge and complex works by Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Verdi were also performed by enormous choirs. The Birmingham Triennial festival used to bring the city’s traffic to a standstill in the 19th century, requiring the country’s first one-way system to deal with crowds who were attending two oratorio concerts a day. More recently, Britten, Holst and Vaughan Williams all wrote music suitable for mass participation that mixed amateurs and professionals.

Our pilot project Crowd Out, performed last year in Birmingham, London (twice) and Berlin, was a shared commission and a shared vision. The great reward was how differently each city reacted to the delivery of the score. Berlin performed Lang’s music out of doors in a very ambitious production that involved adult groups from across the city in a celebration of 50 years of the Philharmonie Hall. London, by contrast, focused on a variety of groups from the East End and included many children in a performance in Arnold Circus that brought a community together and was enjoyed by hundreds more. Birmingham did it in a modern mall situated between its two universities and reached out to groups who had never performed music before.

The Dove and its successors can also be used however each city wishes. In London, it’s at the centre of LSO Discovery’s educational mission of East End inclusiveness. In Berlin, it is at the heart of its mission to get children singing. In Aix, it gives local people the chance be part of a hallowed opera festival.

It’s essential to give a community opera in the mother tongue of its performers so that they can take ownership of the piece and so it can be readily understood by a family audience; Dove’s work will be translated into several further languages in the coming years.

For my money, Dove is one of our finest composers. He has an extraordinary knack (shared particularly with Britten) for getting every element of the piece right. The story is attractive, full of energy, simply told and highly engaging. The music for young children is unison but challenging, set in just the right vocal range. For the teenagers it’s usually in two parts and realistic in its vocal challenges, but highly demanding rhythmically. The adults’ choral music is in up to four parts and designed to challenge but not frighten those who might be returning to singing after a long break.

Meanwhile, the orchestral pros are challenged to within an inch of their lives, leading a cohort of young people who, too, are challenged but not frightened. The music is a glorious mixture of Wagner, minimalism, show-stopping songs, fine melody and jazzy rhythmic complexity, and everyone is enjoying the clever humour of the text (“Theseus is clever / Theseus can box / his arrows are unerring and he works out with rocks”). Every group loves the piece – in fact, Jonathan has been feted by hundreds of autograph-hungry young musicians whichever city he’s in.

This is just the beginning of an annual project of massed participation-staged works for whole communities. Our aim is simple – to give everyone such a good experience they’ll want to take part in music all their lives. And they’ll be the Philharmonic’s (or the LSO’s or the Aix festival’s) devoted followers for ever, embedding these great hallowed institutions into their daily lives. The future of music will be safe if thousands of people identify with our great institutions by taking ownership through participation.

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