Anatomy of a love: Rebecca Saunders’ first opera Lash at Deutsche Oper Berlin

In the opening scene of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, the body of William Holden is found by the police floating in a swimming pool. Regarding the circumstances of his death, Holden himself promises in voice-over to tell the audience the whole, regrettable truth, meaning that throughout the movie we are listening to words of the dead. Letting the corpse speak is, in a way, the very theme of Rebecca Saunders’ first opera, Lash – Acts of Love, which premiered at Deutsche Oper Berlin with Enno Poppe on the podium and the direction of British-Irish collective Dead Centre. Despite the overall success, mixed reactions from the public made me reflect on how staging the body still carries implications of indecency, especially if it’s from a woman’s perspective. 

With a libretto by Saunders and British contemporary artist Ed Atkins, Lash takes its title from a literal eyelash, a recurring element throughout the opera’s three short acts. Saunders explains in the programme notes that she and Atkins share a fascination with similar themes, namely the most corporeal aspects of life: death, sex and loss. All of these are condensed in an eyelash, fallen and rediscovered – a symbol of transience, signifying presence and absence at the same time. Ultimately, the lash is a synecdoche for an entire body, that of a dead lover who left behind fragmented, unresolved memories. Words left unsaid and things left undone make it so that the lash takes on the additional meaning of ‘whip’, coming back to flog who survived. 

The circular, convoluted structure of the piece follows four women on stage whose identity is undefined and constantly shifting in a multitude of viewpoints. The blurring of characters suggests a blurring of experiences and feelings, where the dead and the living are anything but separate – calling to mind Saunders’ past work on James Joyce, as much as Bergman’s Persona. This was further intricated by Dead Centre, who employed live recording as the main feature of their production. Extreme close-ups of the actresses’ lips and eyes, projected on a semi-transparent curtain, amplified the effect of disconnection and multiplied the bodies in real time, making them tangible and unavoidable. By contrast, the stage remained almost bare for most of the opera, occupied only by a few mobile cubic compartments where the four women kept replaying similar scenes: moments of intimacy in a bedroom, the reading of a letter, or a tête-à-tête at a candlelit table. Even inside these boxes, Dead Centre maintained a hybrid of practical and video production by using a green screen to surround actresses with disembodied figures, present only on video and not on stage. 

The occasional raw moments – of sex, affection, and even physical mutilation – match the emotional core of Saunders’ work, rescuing Dead Centre from a certain aseptic detachment from their object. Theatrics-wise, the progressive expansion of the narrative space, with singers and musicians appearing among the audience to perform, followed the intent of the opera, which directly involves the listener in the act of mourning. 

As for the score, two major tendencies can be detected in Saunders’ music. The first I would say is a fairly traditional approach to writing for voice, with singers and orchestra imitating and supporting each other, picking up the same melody or even just the same pitch. The second is more atmospheric, suspended in the orchestra and reliant on the melange of timbres and harmonies. Within this simple approach, Saunders finds countless ways to be creative, including the use of an electric guitar and two Korg synthesisers, and revealing keen melodic and harmonic sensibility. 

Poppe brought the best out of the score, not only lingering on internal details and giving polyphony ample space but also keeping in mind the narrative arcs within the acts. After a mostly soft-spoken first act, it was the centre of the opera, more overtly concerned with desire, that burst in fortissimi. This proceeded well into the final section of the piece – with four percussionists performing on stage – just to slowly dissolve into the ending. 

In an interview, Saunders recalls that she worked in close touch with each of the four performers to develop their parts individually and tailor them according to their qualities. This is why the four characters have no real names and are instead marked with the initials of the singers. Their identity was only distinguishable through music: Anna Prohaska’s smooth, airy soprano, Noa Frenkel’s wistful yet visceral alto, Sarah Maria Sun’s pinpoint coloratura, and Katja Kolm’s mostly spoken part, often uttered while stuttering, gasping, mumbling. Together, the four women created a multifaceted, fluctuating identity, which left the audience gazing at the mystery of life and death.