In one scene of George Benjamin’s new opera “Picture a Day Like This,” which premieres on Wednesday at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, a composer and her assistant cut off an interviewer midsentence. The composer asks whether there’s space in her schedule to speak; “five minutes,” the assistant replies.
Thankfully, Benjamin had considerably more time to talk when he met with a journalist at his West London home on a sunny Monday in May.
If the premiere of “Picture a Day Like This,” written with the playwright Martin Crimp, is highly anticipated, that is because anticipation has long accompanied new works by Benjamin, 63. Initially, for their infrequency — creative block in his early career meant that he produced only a few minutes of music each year — but lately for their critical acclaim.
Earlier stage works with Crimp, “Written on Skin” (2012) and “Lessons in Love and Violence” (2018), have quickly entered the repertory of major European opera houses. But it is their first opera, the one-act “Into the Little Hill,” from 2006, that most resembles “Picture a Day Like This,” in its size, duration and subject matter.
Indeed, “Picture,” also a one-act, could be paired with “Into the Little Hill,” a retelling of the Pied Piper fairy tale, for a future double bill. Still, “Picture” stands alone, an operatic fable about the pursuit of happiness. It combines two plots, Crimp said in an interview. The first, “The Happy Man’s Shirt,” is an ancient European satire in which a ruler nearing death is told he will be cured if he finds the shirt of a happy man; the only truly happy person he finds, though, is a man too poor to own one. And the second is based a Buddhist story in which a woman goes in search of a miracle to return her infant child from the dead.
The hourlong opera, for chamber orchestra and a cast of five, “is a quest, like ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ or Voltaire’s ‘Candide,’” Crimp said. “But it’s a learning structure, if you like, which follows one character from beginning to end, where the encounters are with a variety of new people.”
Compared with their previous operas, which have rotated around a fixed point or situation, “Picture,” Crimp said, has “a kind of linear, sequential propulsion.” It follows a mother, whose child has died, on a quest to find the button from the sleeve of a happy person’s shirt (which will secure the child’s return); along the way, she meets a variety of flawed characters.
“Within a structure like that, variety is very important,” Crimp said, adding that early discussions with Benjamin about the opera “gave him the license to experiment with very different tones and moods through the different encounters.”
Accordingly, Benjamin said, the work “is like a series of bubbles” that the woman walks through. With no precedent or consequence to each moment, and without cumulative material to refer to or push forward, every scene change left him feeling like he “was starting a new piece almost entirely.”
A solution was inspired by Vladimir Nabokov — whose writing fixated Benjamin as he composed “Picture” — and his mosaic-like approach. An idea would arrive fully formed in Nabokov’s head, but realizing it on paper would involve jumping around the structure of the piece. “He would write something that ended up on page 238, followed by something for page 5, something for page 15,” Benjamin said. “Bit by bit, these things would fuse from different angles, and suddenly the seamless text would be written at the end, but it wasn’t composed like that.”
“My experience with myself,” he added, “is that it would be a big mistake to start at the beginning.”
Benjamin and Crimp are one of the most successful opera partnerships of our time. They were introduced through the musicologist Laurence Dreyfus in 2005, after Benjamin had met dozens of playwrights and film directors with a view toward writing an opera, including Arthur Miller and David Lynch. The composer Harrison Birtwistle encouraged Benjamin to “find the one person with whom it really works, and stick with them.”
Crimp, Benjamin said, writes “terrifying, unflinching, and uncompromising plays” that contrast with a man who, when they first met, he found “gentle of nature.” Crimp said that their relationship has continued because they both have “a special respect for the work of the other.” The lines are drawn precisely in their collaboration; they decide on a story, structure and general trajectory, then leave each other to get to it. Benjamin said that Crimp doesn’t email him any drafts; “they just arrive,” he added, “in a brown, A4 envelope suddenly one morning.”
At the Aix Festival, “Picture” will be directed by Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma, who staged the premiere of “Into the Little Hill” in Paris. In their treatment of the story, the woman is trapped in what they called a “mental prison,” in which the characters she meets — two lovers, an artisan and a collector — float in and out of her life.
“It’s an adventure of a soul,” Jeanneteau said, adding that the key to the piece is its simplicity.
Through simplicity comes banality, a consideration rich with possibility in playwriting but much more difficult in opera. When writing “Into the Little Hill,” Crimp had, at the back of his mind, the idea of incorporating banal language from everyday life, words like electricity, concrete and refrigerator. “Picture,” with its characters’ distinctly contemporary concerns — topics include mattresses, chlorpromazine and lakeside Austrian retreats — steps closer to his goal.
“You can flirt with the banal on the edges of a musical work” like “Picture,” Crimp said, “but ultimately, that’s done to prepare the ground to enter into a much deeper metaphysical space.”
Benjamin said that he has “always thought of orchestral pieces, even chamber music as a theatrical thing.” Even so, the drastic changes of tone in Crimp’s libretto for “Picture” have brought a new, dramatic volatility to his operatic writing.
“I think he enjoys challenging me, you know: ‘You haven’t done this before, this will be hard, let’s see what you can do,’” Benjamin said of Crimp. “And I like that.”
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