Could it really be true that Queen Elizabeth I never actually met her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots? It’s almost unbelievable that this famously turbulent relationship was conducted entirely remotely – through mediators and courtiers, and through writing. A physical confrontation was something many dramatists have been tempted to invent. Yet perhaps because of this enforced distance, the cousins lived inside each other’s heads. “The other was there, in their mind, the whole time. The threat was always palpable.”
So says Heather Betts, artist and librettist, sat alongside her husband, composer Brett Dean and daughter, mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean when they call from Munich. They have been at work on Of One Blood, a new opera which has this tempestuous political and familial relationship at its centre.
“There’s also so much mystery still in this story,” Heather says. “There are facts: certain people died, or were murdered or imprisoned, a baby was born, who became James I and VI. But there are also massive questions: Mary’s husband, Lord Darnley, was murdered – who did it? How did that occur? Who was complicit? No one really knows.”
For Brett Dean, aside from being a close collaboration with his own family, this new opera is a welcome return to the world of Elizabethan English – in this case, assembled directly from letters and writings of Elizabeth and Mary themselves. “I found that what I loved about the Hamlet experience was diving deep into that world. It’s the beauty of the language, but also the sense of abstraction it brings,” Brett says. “But unlike an invented or imagined narrative like Hamlet, we have this amazing story history has given us, with their own words that Heather has selected and placed together.”
Lotte, sat between her parents, chimes in. “I’m also curious: why Mary, Queen of Scots? Years ago, when Vladimir Jurowski came to you for the commission pitch for Bayerische Staatsoper…?” Brett is pensive. “It took quite a while to hit on the right thing: in early conversations, when it came around to Maria Stuart of Schiller, looking at possibly setting that like Donizetti did, I felt, ‘Oh!’” While the idea had come from Brett, like most people aware of the broad outlines of the history, there was still much about the detail of the story he was unfamiliar with. “I knew of its dramatic potential. But digging into it, I thought holey moley, there’s so much there for the taking.”
“It’s intensely operatic, and it’s not the first opera adaptation. There are two…” Lotte says. “At least!” says Brett. “The Donizetti and the Thea Musgrave, and Gloriana perhaps,” Lotte adds. “And of course the Schiller play – it’s not as if no one has ever interpreted this story theatrically before. But maybe no one has gone directly to the source material.”
“Even up until quite recently,” Heather says, “because Mary loved writing in code – before she was even in prison, when that was the only way of communicating with outsiders – some of these letters have only just been found. Amateur codebreakers managed to break a code in a letter that’s been in a museum for 450 years. When they broke it, they suddenly realised: this is Mary! There are still clues coming through, all this time later, despite the myriad of academics who have pored over this stuff.”
Creating an opera in the contemporary era arguably affords a much greater level of flexibility. In Schiller and Donizetti’s adaptations, Elizabeth and Mary have a dramatic confrontation in person. It didn’t happen in reality, and doesn’t happen in Of One Blood either. But this doesn’t mean that both characters never appear onstage at the same time. In fact, “they’re on stage together a lot of the time, but both in their own realms,” Heather says. “It’s like split-screen. They sing together too.”
“Around each Queen, who are both sopranos – though very different sorts of sopranos – are a consort of vocalists,” Brett explains. “Mary is surrounded by five women, a female consort, one of whom is Lotte; and Elizabeth has five men. In Mary’s case, they’re ladies-in-waiting, messengers and so on; and in Elizabeth’s case, they’re her lords, not necessarily named, but including William Cecil. They also take on short cameo roles: the first tenor sings the role of Lord Darnley, Mary’s second husband, and the first baritone sings Rizzio, Mary’s secretary who was later murdered. We do go into specific bits of the story, but also keep it fairly symbolic, concentrating on these two amazing archetypes.”
“Different perspectives can happen concurrently,” Heather says. “Especially now though, in a way that Donizetti couldn’t have,” Lotte adds. “You mean that Donizetti couldn’t have pre-recorded audio cues?” Brett says. The opera begins with the sounds of pens scratching, given the centrality of both women’s writing. “There’s a lot of sound design, which we’ve only heard bits of in the last two days,” Brett says. “One of the percussionists from the Sydney Symphony had a stick which he’d picked up off the road. It ended up being the best possible thing to use on the skin of a bass drum, to emulate handwriting, of a quill pen on parchment paper.”
While having a hyper-reality of its own, there is a sense in which the piece is more ‘realist’ than Schiller and Donizetti’s efforts – attempting to reach Elizabeth and Mary as documentary, historical persons. Historical music is also used to depict the court world of Elizabeth. “It’s been a deep dive into the whole Tudor musical world. In particular William Byrd, but also Tallis, John Bull and in fact the big scene where Mahan Esfahani appears, as Elizabeth’s musician, as a symbol of her court.” Brett explains the onstage presence of a court musician is a symbol of Elizabeth’s greater power. “The whole second scene, the first time we get to see Elizabeth, uses John Bull’s Walsingham Variations almost like a passacaglia. It’s an extraordinary piece of keyboard music – as Mahan says, the birth of modern keyboard writing. He sees a line through John Bull and William Byrd to Bach and Beethoven and beyond. But also, the fact that the Walsingham Variations were in the collections, the virginal books, that Elizabeth published.”
Influence from English Madrigalism and consort singing also appears throughout the opera, lending an unusual texture and sound, with inspiration coming from Tallis and Byrd to figures as far afield as Michael Cavendish and Ellis Gibbons. “Both consorts, but especially the female consort, sing a not-very operatic style for sections of the piece. It’s quite unusual I think,” Lotte says. “It puts us in a decidedly different time and place.”
The writing for the main soprano roles also builds on Dean’s soprano writing for Ophelia in Hamlet, sung with extraordinary precision and flexibility by Barbara Hannigan. In Of One Blood, Dean takes two different approaches to soprano writing. “Mary is a lighter, lyric soprano, and with Vera-Lotte Boecker we have someone who can really float up precariously high, and has this much more etherial sound world. Whereas Elizabeth is Johanni van Oostrum, she’s an experienced Wagnerian,” Brett explains. “Elizabeth is nine years older than Mary, she had more power and wealth at her disposal. I wanted somehow to reflect her incumbency, and in that regard a kind of superiority over Mary… I had this image for Elizabeth of lots of brass – though at some point you have to give that up because you want to hear her. Even a Wagnerian soprano won’t survive heavy brass all night.”
Has creating an opera as a family been fraught with conflict and argument? “I’m a visual artist, I paint, and Brett and I have been together our whole lives,” Heather explains. “We both met originally in the orchestra – I used to play viola many years ago, believe it or not. With any project we’ve done, we’ve always been accustomed to have space to share ideas, to spin ideas off, to sometimes receive criticism, have ideas road tested, whether in my field or his field.” “There’s been several people I’ve spoken to who work with family as well, and it’s not always easy,” Lotte adds. “For some others it can be really not easy. But I feel very lucky that for us it’s not been an issue.” “We always start with a basis of mutual respect and support,” Heather says. “And then we go to the pub!” says Brett.
“It’s very handy being in the same household,” Heather adds. “When there are small changes that needed to be made either way, we could just thrash it out on the spot. A few more words here, or maybe that bit’s too long… In fact, we have a huge roll of my art paper, rolled all along the wall of Brett’s studio, and divided up into the eight scenes, plus prologue and epilogue. On the sofa on the other side of the room, you can sit and see the whole opera as one, over the years it’s been coming into formation.”
Besides its premiere at Bayerische Staatsoper, in a production by Claus Guth, with musical direction Vladimir Jurowski, Of One Blood will continue to dominate the lives of the Betts-Dean family over the next few years. Productions are lined up at co-commissioners Santa Fe, Garsington and South Australian Opera. (“South Australia just wrote today to say that it won’t be before 2029,” Brett says.) While it can be experienced in a single evening, an opera can easily take up the lives of its creators for a decade.
Meanwhile, the Betts-Deans are furiously busy with simultaneous, affiliated projects. Heather has a new series of artworks based on her work with the libretto, to be exhibited shortly. Lotte and Brett’s album on Hänssler Classic with the Armida Quartet includes the mezzo and string quartet song cycle Madame ma bonne soeur, written in preparation for Of One Blood. Earlier this year, Brett made his debut conducting Lotte with the Aurora Orchestra at Kings Place, and at the BBC Proms in July his new vocal and orchestra piece The World’s Wife for Claire Booth will be premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
And Brett is happy to reveal that, starting this September, he is returning as composer-in-residence with “my old band, the Berlin Philharmonic”. Truly you cannot put this family down.
Of One Blood premieres at Nationaltheater Munich from 10th–27th May. Later performances in Munich are in June and October.
See upcoming performances of Brett Dean and Lotte Betts-Dean.
