I had high hopes for Julian Anderson’s first opera, Thebans. Premièred at the Coliseum last Saturday, it promised to mark a departure from the trendiness of ENO’s recent commissions, Nico Muhly’s Two Boys, for example, or the dreadful Sunken Garden — in fact, ENO’s next season seems to reflect a company at last a little less enamoured of innovation for its own sake. Thebans, the advance publicity suggested, was to be a serious, grown-up work, closer in spirit, perhaps, to Detlev Glanert’s Caligula, of which ENO gave the UK première two years ago.
The company had put a lot of faith in Anderson, currently composer-in-residence at Wigmore Hall and a master of orchestral colour and texture. But he’d been mulling over an opera based on Sophocles’ three Theban Plays for a couple of decades, we were told, and was collaborating on the piece with Frank McGuinness, who has already produced a couple of Sophocles adaptations for the theatre (and who, amusingly, his biography in ENO’s programme also claims ‘is currently working on an opera cycle on the Oedipus Trilogy for ROH’). Given their long relationships with the material, then, it seemed all the more disappointing in the event that, for all the skill they showed, neither man seemed to have very much to say about it. They had apparently striven for ambiguity, to avoid ‘clear answers or simple characters’, but the result felt straightforwardly evasive and short on conviction.
For a start, McGuinness’s text, although an impressive feat of distillation, is more a précis than an adaptation, in which dogged concern for ploughing through the action precludes any opportunity for lyrical reflection or psychological development — in short, any opportunity for the things that I’d have thought would make it worth producing as an opera in the first place.
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