Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera Festen opened at Covent Garden earlier this month, and reader, I messed up. I broke my own golden rule with new operas: don’t do any homework, don’t try to memorise the plot, and whatever you do, don’t revisit the source material. The aim is to experience the new work on its own terms. That’s hard enough, given the PR onslaught that precedes any Royal Opera première – the way the classical establishment circles the wagons, and the unspoken consensus that certain living composers (including Adès, Benjamin and Turnage, though not Judith Weir, curiously) are simply too big to fail.
But no: I rewatched Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 Dogme movie, twice, and it was the wrong decision. Inevitably, and unfairly, you cross-reference. Festen (spoiler alert) pivots on a revelation of child sexual abuse at a very public family gathering. If you know it’s coming, you’re steeled against it; worse, it can feel as if you’re being challenged to respond in a particular way. The composer and his librettist Lee Hall are defying you not to be moved. Does it even matter, any more, what the score does, and what the words say?
Where the film makes its impact in glimpses and flashes – a rapid-fire simulation of unvarnished objectivity – the opera spreads emotions like jam. There are fierce orchestral gestures, flights of heartfelt, melancholy arioso, and a bright arrival chorus that returns, transformed, as a slightly too neat closing gesture. Vinterberg somehow suggests complex hinterlands for a surprising number of characters; the opera inevitably focuses on fewer and leaves others feeling incomplete or unrealised.
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