Welsh composer Huw Watkins is among the most established figures working in British contemporary music. His opera In the Locked Room, created in partnership with David Harsent and premiered six years ago, is set for a fresh interpretation in a couple of months’ time, in a production designed by theatre director Stephen Unwin. Based on Thomas Hardy’s 1894 short story An Imaginative Woman, the opera is being performed as part of a double-bill at the Royal College of Music, where Watkins was once a student. Our discussion began by looking at the nature and implications of setting Hardy’s psychologically-charged story to music.
SC: The librettist for In the Locked Room, David Harsent, has said that it was you who suggested the subject for the opera.
HW: Yes indeed.
So what led you to choose this particular story of Hardy’s? What do you believe the opera has to say to us today?
There was something about the bleakness of the story that stuck in my mind since reading it as a teenager. I also knew that David would use it as a starting point, and not some slavish adaptation. I think the claustrophobic unhappiness of Ella’s marriage struck us both as something worth exploring. I didn’t set out with the intention of saying something relevant, but hoped that since the story struck a chord with me, it might also with today’s listeners.
How was the working relationship with David Harsent? Was it collaborative in terms of deciding how to edit and amend the story, or did he simply present you with a completed libretto and you then set to work?
David was a joy to work with. He’s much more experienced writing operas than me, so after we’d chosen the Hardy, I was happy to let him get on with it. Of course, having now written an opera, if I were ever to write another one, I would know better what kind of things to ask for from a librettist, but there was almost nothing I needed to ask David to change when he sent me his completed first draft. (We had to remove the phrase “shades of grey” when the novel became famous...)
We know well from works like Britten’s Turn of the Screw and, of course, Maxwell Davies’ The Lighthouse (being performed alongside your opera) the extent to which chamber operas can establish an overwhelming sense of intimacy; and also in operas such as Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Henze’s Boulevard Solitude that the use of just a single act creates a particularly intense kind of drama. Being a single-act chamber opera, In the Locked Room is therefore something of a “double whammy”, and the same is true of Crime Fiction, the half-hour chamber opera you composed in 2008. Are you particularly drawn to this kind of heightened, small-scale operatic narrative?
You’re quite right, and indeed, those works – particularly the Bartók, Britten and Maxwell Davies – made big impressions on me early on. The obsessive, almost pathological, fascination Ella has for Pascoe, seemed to me perfect for a piece of this length and size. I should also say that Ruby Hughes, the original Ella, was a singer who I knew would be able to communicate these qualities powerfully.
Do you have aspirations to compose an opera on a much larger scale?
Yes, if the opportunity ever arose, I would like to write something larger scale, but only when I’ve found absolutely the right subject for me.
Was the decision to change Hardy’s story in order to remove Ella’s death a way of seeking to reduce some of the bleakness which in such an intense, intimate context as this might have proved too desolate for an audience? Alternatively, do you regard this decision as a means of empowering Ella?