A Dance to the Music of Time: We Are the Lucky Ones is the time to be alive at DNO

Initially inspired by Annie Ernaux’s The Years, Philip Venables’ new piece for Dutch National Opera – his first opera for full orchestra – widens the canvas to take in the whole of Europe’s postwar generation. A collaboration with Ted Huffman and Nina Segal, whose beautifully crafted verbatim libretto in itself represents a significant work of oral history, We Are the Lucky Ones is marvellous in scope and achievement.

Huffman and Segal interviewed dozens of people born in the 1940s asking them “What is your most vivid memory?” and “What have you never told anyone?” The result is by turns a harrowing, tender, funny, non-judgmental living portrait of a generation widely regarded as the winners, and a profound reflection on the human condition. Taking his inspiration from the 20th century’s culturally polyphonic second half, Venables has created a huge-hearted score bursting with nostalgic references to Hollywood, jazz and dance and popular classics, with sublime vocal writing in which the soloists are their own chorus, all in a musical language that is entirely his own. 

A single bulb – a ‘ghost light’ – is illuminated at the back of a bare stage that has been extended to form an apron in front of, and above, the orchestra pit. Eight singers in evening dress appear through a door in the black back wall. This being a generation born into war, the piece’s high drama is front-loaded as an almighty opening ‘shock and awe’ chord blasts from the pit. It’s also the sound of Venables rolling up his sleeves in glee at being let loose on the Hague’s Residentie Orkest and the fearless baton of Bassem Akiki. Éclat dispatched, the passage of time creeps in on a sinuous, unsettling glissando reminiscent of a similar time-bending motif in Mica Levi’s score for the film Jackie. With the orchestral volume rising exponentially and all eight singers at full tilt almost immediately to depict the chaos of conflict – the rapist soldier killed with a blow to the head that then “leaks like fruit” – it takes a moment to remember that these indelible images narrated in the present tense by adults are the experience of childhood. As the war ends, the euphoric swank of a marching band – imagine Shostakovich outrageously multiplied – conveys the bravura of victory, the confusion of defeat, relief, celebration and lasting displacement.

Melody asserts itself in peacetime and there’s a delicious close-harmony octet on how to eat your first orange. Venables is a master of imagery. Using a simple ascending scale motif throughout to travel hopefully into each new era, he finds an ingenious variation to describe early space exploration. A series of turns, ascending semitone by semitone capture the trepidation of the rocket launch with their inescapable implication that what goes up must also come down. A baby, born to the spare, metallic plinking of a harp’s uppermost strings, is thus presented as alien, alarming, until the sound fills out through the orchestra as the anxious new parents relax and get the hang of it.

While political upheaval per se is left to the well-chosen projections of video artists Nadja Sofie Elder and Tobias Staab, there are moments of gentle irony. This firmly middle-class chronicle, in which dance and movement creates the dimension more usually associated with a set, includes what Brecht might have named a ‘tango of inequality’ in which a woman laments – despite that they “get on so well” – the inefficiency of her cleaning lady. In another, the prevailing expectations of stereotypical 20th century man are gently sent up in a bossa nova of material gain’ as the four male principals dance to a list of cars, houses, jobs and families.

All eight singers were superb but special mention must go to Belgian soprano Katrien Baerts who, on Saturday night, stepped in at two days’ notice to make a wonderful job of Claron McFadden’s vocal role when the American suffered an allergic reaction.

Will we learn the lessons of history? Reflections – spoken over a simple hum from the orchestra that holds the tension whenever the music drops away – suggest that mistakes may have been made. Fears are voiced for an uncertain future. As the past catches up with us, the advice to the grandchildren is this: “Try to make a world that you can believe in.” With We Are the Lucky Ones, Team Venables has done just that. 

Eleanor's accommodation in Amsterdam was funded by Dutch National Opera