POTTER THOMPSON LASTS for ninety minutes in performance, and took seventeen years to prepare. I cannot say whether it is normal for a librettist to conceive and structure an opera, because I am musically illiterate. I know none of the technicalities. A score is a pattern, and C sharp or B flat are meaningless. Yet Gordon Crosse asked me to write for him, and Potter Thompson is the result.1
The seventeen years of preparation were spent in my learning something of the difficulties of language, and produced five novels and a Nativity play. By the time the fifth novel had developed, I knew that I had reached a point where the words were picked clean. I was at the bone. To have gone further would have been to snap syntax and to be in danger of writing a blank page. The next words would have to be inflected: they needed to be sung.
Crosse must have sensed this development before he wrote to me. We met, and he told me that the Finchley Group wanted to commission an opera, and that he hoped that Michael Elliott would direct it. For me, this triangular relationship has been an extraordinary period, after the essentially isolated time as a novelist. Director, composer and librettist were working together even before a theme for the opera had been chosen.
None of the three of us believes that much good can come of writing by committee, and Potter Thompson was not written in that way; but there was a collaborative aspect.
The best image I can think of is the three overlapping circles of the ATV testcard. Each is itself, different from the others, but, where they overlap, the colours fuse to white. That, metaphorically, is the area of collaboration, and it was my job to find it.
There were requirements dictated by the nature of the commission: professional standards, based on children’s performances. We agreed that the piece should be immediately exciting, without loss of subtlety. I felt that a mythological root was needed, and I remember churning out myth after myth, while my collaborators shook their heads in a sustained display of non-collaboration. I was looking for the white overlap, and I was not succeeding.
Then I suggested the myth of the Sleeping Hero, a prime myth of Britain. My childhood had been spent on one of the sites of its manifestation, and it had generated my first book. It ought to have been my first thought for the opera, because, as soon as I mentioned it, we had our common ground.
The myth takes several forms, but the central story is of the man who finds the Hero asleep under a hill, starts to wake him, but stops short of the final ritual act. Our common ground was a curiosity to discover why the mortal refuses the immortal. Why does Potter Thompson not bring the shining Hero out of the hill?
To précis a work is to diminish it. To say what Potter Thompson is about is to limit your freedom as an audience; but, if I am to convey something of the alchemy of collaboration, I have to describe the material.
The opera begins with Potter Thompson sitting alone on the skyline of a hill. It is Bilberry Night of Lunacy Day: the old festival of harvest, now no more than a village romp.
Spring for ploughing, sowing.
Summer, strength, growing.
Autumn ripeness corn and reaping.
Winter eating!
Harvest is here and hunger is over,
The red hag is dead.
Picking of bilberries, singing and dancing,
Bilberry bracelet boy makes for girl.
The decadence is obvious. The event is as religious as a modern Rose Queen. The villagers try to involve Potter Thompson, but he will not be drawn. He snarls his aloofness.
They think they know!
It’s Bilberry Night.
They think it’s all over.
It’s just beginning.
Let them be merry and marry,
They’ll never have rest.
While they are leaping,
Winter is creeping.
I’m knitting a vest.
Harvest is here and summer is over.
Night stretches.
Knit one.
From this superficial conflict between a gang of villagers and a pessimistic recluse the action changes abruptly to something menacing.
Potter Thompson is seen to be not so much anti-social as frightened. His fear is the secret pain that Bilberry Night holds for him. Once, on this night, when he was younger, his “ceremony of innocence” was drowned. We are not told the details: they would probably appear insignificant: but the moment has become trapped within Potter Thompson, and he within the moment. The pain is so unbearable each Bilberry Night, so strong, that it is personified as the characters called Boy/Girl. They sing the first line of the opera.
The threat of Boy/Girl and the villagers makes Potter Thompson try to run away. He falls on the rocks and down into the hill. Here, through a phantasmagoria, he undergoes a mystical ordeal of initiation into the elements of his craft: Earth, Water, Air and Fire; and beyond these to the Sleeping Hero.
For me, this development of the myth was the clearest instance of dictate’s stimulating, rather than restricting, invention. One adult professional singer, Potter Thompson, moves through, and is moved by, the vitality of children. Around his strength, ebullience can play, and together make something serious and new.
An example is the treatment of the Air Elementals. I saw them as dervish mops from a carwash. They dry Potter Thompson after his ordeal by water, working in pairs, as rollers. Yet carwash mops also resemble African masks. Children know the nice balance between humour and fear.
The Elementals who plague Potter Thompson are really his tutors, instructing him in the litany:
What moves Earth?
Water.
What moves Water?
Air.
What moves Air?
Flame.
What moves Flame?
Time.
Release from each element is always towards something that appears to be worse, and Potter Thompson moves only because he is goaded by the pursuing songs of Boy/Girl.
Boy/Girl link the external world of the village, the private world of Potter Thompson and the mystical world of the Elementals. They stand between ritual and tradition, and their words are close to those of children’s playground games.
BOY: She said and she said And what did she say?
GIRL: She said that she loved, But who did she love?
BOY: Suppose she said she loved me.
GIRL: She never said that, whatever she said.
BOY: Oh yes, she said, and that’s what she said.
GIRL: All dressed in white.
BOY: She’s for another, and not for me. I thank you for your courtesy.
PT: Bird on briar I told it to. No other one I dare.
GIRL: The nightingale sings –
PT: All my life, leave me not –
GIRL: That all the wood rings –
PT: Leave me not, leave me not –
GIRL: She sings in her song –
PT: All my life, leave me not –
GIRL: That the night is too long.
PT: Not leave alone. Take this load from me, Or else I am gone.
BOY: I am so withered up with years, I can’t be young again.
On the surface of the story, Boy/Girl hint at lost love in Potter Thompson’s youth: a wound that was the cause of his isolation and of his craft as a potter. At first, their role may seem to be romantic and lyrical, but they are an aberration, a sickness within. They are Potter Thompson’s prisoners and they torture him.
Boy/Girl drive Potter Thompson towards the Hero. Each step from element to element, Earth to Water to Air to Fire, is made to escape them, but the more Potter Thompson dares, the clearer Boy/Girl become. As he passes through the stages of his initiation, he is cleansed, there are fewer and fewer impurities in his clay and therefore fewer and fewer distractions from Boy/Girl, until, rather than face up to them, he enters the furnace of the sun to the Hero’s cave.
But they’re not here.
No Boy and no Girl.
If He wakes,
Will there be no more?
Will there be
Bilberry end?
My head no more
Rampicked by the stars,
No more agait with dreams?
In the consummation of the opera, the question that Gordon Crosse, Michael Elliott and I had to answer is answered, at least for us.
Potter Thompson has been a process of discovery. The process was brought about by sustained acts of aggression. We ganged up on each other. Since the concept had been mine, the initiative lay with me. We had discussed abstract principles, but nothing else would happen until there were some words.
I produced a draft, and the other two tore it up for me. I produced another. They tore it up. And so we went on, through draft after draft. I had to justify every move I made. Gordon Crosse would explain his problems in linguistic, not musical, terms; and Michael Elliott would point out each stupidity and non sequitur; and I would pick up the pieces and start again, criticised but not dictated to.
In this way I learnt our strengths and our weaknesses, and where to heed and where to reject. Finally, I knew when to tell the composer and the director to shut up; and they knew that I meant what I said. The next draft would be the libretto, good or bad.
Then it was Crosse’s turn to endure. If we had worked well, my sense of language, which Crosse himself calls “symphonic”, would give him enough music; and at least he knew that I could not interfere with his art. Yet I suspect that the director and the librettist were able to help the composer less than the composer and the director had helped the librettist. Music is a more private world than language.
The triumvirate was a good instrument. But Potter Thompson, which I am proud to have found and to have shaped, stands clearly as the work of Gordon Crosse.
1 This essay was first published in Music and Musicians, January 1975.