George Benjamin

George Benjamin: A few years ago I found the book again with European myths going back thousands of years. Some of them are very famous: Orpheus, Heracles, Beowulf… all sorts of ancient stories narrated and illustrated in a very communicative way for a child. And I already loved opera at that time. I had a very strange hobby: I would shut out the real world and improvise operas in my imagination. And inside my inner ear I would hear the total texture and harmony, with a Strauss-sized orchestra (I adored Salome when I was young!). It sounds ridiculous, even embarrassing, to me now but it was very real for me then.

I could remember going to Wozzeck, Parsifal, Carmen and Lulu, Salome and Elektra, La Damnation de Faust… 

I always loved heavy stuff. My very first operas were Le Comte Ory and The Magic Flute, and I’m a faire I didn’t like either of them. They seemed silly to me, and they had no real drama – and Rossini (but not Mozart!) remains a closed book for me. And then I went (at about 10, 11) to the Damnation of Faust which, though not really an opera, received a very interesting production at English National Opera, and I loved the music and the thrill, the danger, and the drama and the tension. This was a revelation. 

Yes, but then I only liked pop music, which was particularly good in the early Sixties. When extremely young I often used to invent melodies in my head before going to sleep at night, where I could hear the harmony and the sound in my inner ear – without knowing what such phenomena were. But then I discovered classical music and everything changed completely…

My dad could play the piano a little bit, my mum couldn’t play anything, but both liked music very much, and I remember my mum’s response to music was extremely intense. She loved it. They regularly took me to concerts and operas, until I was old enough to go alone, and by the the age of 12 I went to about three concerts every week. I was a fanatic!

I can’t remember exactly. I heard Wozzeck when I was really young, and was spell-bound by it. Then I recall the amazing magic of Ligeti in 1969 when my father took me to 2001 – A Space Odyssey. I heard Messiaen’s organ music in Westminster Abbey and asked: who wrote this extraordinary harmony? The answer came: Messiaen, the first time I ever heard his name And then I saw Boulez on television when I was around 12. And so, bit by bit, my repertoire expanded deeper into the 20th century…

Absolutely – indeed, isn’t that essential? Berg’s approach to construction is close to a miracle. This music is so irresistibly potent on the ear, heart and mind…

More than I can possibly describe, because he was such an extraordinary artist and man. At the Conservatoire he gave three classes each week, all usually lasting four to five hours. During these immense sessions, students would often bring their scores and I would show him my newest efforts as they grew, week by week. But there was also a huge amount of analysis of a very wide diversity of music, old and very new, European or from distant cultures. At all times he seemed to me to have a magical aura about him. He was a great man, gifted with exceptional simplicity, enormous generosity, enormous curiosity and an unending love for music. I miss him very, very greatly.

There was a time where I couldn’t realise what I wanted. And in a way I also didn’t even know what I wanted. And so I went through a challenging and difficult period, and it took me at least a couple of years to surface again. Very gradually, however, things improved, and by the early 1990s confidence and clarity began to return. But such crises are, with regret, all too natural for some composers…

A little bit. I’m not an expert, but I did play ragtime on the piano when I was a child, Scott Joplin, and I joined a jazz band at school. And I had a job when I just finished at college, for a few months, to play jazz in a night club in order to start making a living. Whenever I played classical music for my own pleasure, the management insisted that I stopped and stuck to more popular repertoire – so I had to play Cole Pole and Gershwin and same other famous pre-war jazz. And virtually no one ever listened while I played, so in the end it was a very dispiriting experience…

Oh yes, they were very gifted. 

That came when I was about thirty. We have a huge Indian community in London and I always loved Indian food, so I had a degree of contact with this extraordinary culture. Nimbus Records, who have been very loyal to me and my music for over 40 years, released an extraordinary series CDs devoted to the very best Indian music in the 1980s, which they gave me as a gift. More than one of them was dedicated to the great flautist, Hariprasad Chaurasia, whose music I found irresistibly seductive on the ear. He often came to London on tour, and I contacted him and asked him to come to my composition class  to play to my students and me – and, unexpectedly, he agreed. So I went to collect him from Ealing and drove him and his tabla player quite a few miles to my home, where they stayed for several unforgettable hours. It was an incredibly beautiful encounter. He had this wooden flute – it could have been 10,000 years old – yet with the simplest means he achieved miracles of melody, nuance, tuning and expression : it moved me deeply and immediately. I asked him many questions about Indian music, about style, about the approach to rhythm, timbre and form and his answers were absolutely revelatory. What do I like about Indian music? Firstly, it moves me; secondly, I admire the rhythmical world, which makes most of Western music seem very primitive in comparison; then the timbral world is absolutely irresistible. But the technical world is also highly interesting – the specific (and often quite complex) rules and limitations associated with each individual raga, which guide and shape the wonderfully ornate approach to melody. This was very provocative to my mind…

Yes, the tiny detunings…. and the rules by which where they can be used and where they can’t be used, in which direction. It’s very very subtle. And of course, the relationship of the ragas to metaphysical elements, to the time of day, to feeling, all sorts of things. And I love the way improvisations begin by slowly exploring a raga – first one note, then two, three – and a tension is created concerning what will be the next note and how it will be revealed. And, when it is approached in a good way, a learned Indian audience will literally groan with pleasure at the skill of the musician. Such an approach could easily become didactic if transferred directly to Western music, but it also proved to be provocative for my imagination.

In my music, it’s very rare that all twelve notes are heard within a bar. And if, say, eight or nine pitches are present at a given moment I’m aware of the ones that are missing, and how they might enter in due course. Quite a few early sketches in my work – particularly for complex passages – consist of a stream of missing notes plotted against time…

When I was at school I wrote music for the productions of plays we mounted: George Bernard Shaw, Much Ado about Nothing, Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas, even some freshly created dramas with a schoolfriend… These sometimes featured up to thirty minutes of music, scored for eight, nine young people to play and with me conducting from the piano. And so I had the experience of making theatre, with an audience behind my back, from an early age. That was really an important thing for me. I loved it. And that is one of the reasons why not being able write an opera, for so many years, created a real sense of frustration. I felt the theatre was in my blood. 

I love the cinema – though I never wanted to write film music. However, while a student in Cambridge, I started to improvise for silent movies, something I greatly enjoyed for a few years. I must have done this around 50 times! I usually performed without preparation – seeing the film for the first time while playing – and not employing the standard pianistic cliches associated with the genre. Occasionally my improvisations took wing, and that was almost always associated with more serious and dark material – particularly the great films of Fritz Lang, Murnau and Pabst… The results had virtually no relationship to my ‘real’ composed music, but perhaps I gained important lessons about the control of tension over large stretches of time, how to shape characterisation and atmosphere, and how to respond to narrative (and, on occasion, subvert it). Perhaps these experiences were not without use to a future composer of operas…

I don’t know. I had a lot of technical issues to sort out as a composer. I felt the need to find a fresh approach to the human voice and its relationship with instrumental writing. The solutions around me didn’t satisfy me. The harmonic dimension. And so I had to really go deep down in my musical DNA and find solutions. But I was always aiming, even in instrumental pieces, towards opera. That’s why I periodically wrote vocal pieces, and some of my purely instrumental writing also leaned towards the vocal. But beyond these technical issues and challenges, I also wanted to tell stories, which isn’t always fashionable in new opera. I wanted to tell them directly and clearly, but in a new way. And I didn’t see how to do that. I knew I didn’t want to go back to 19th or early-20th century naturalism, romanticism or expressionism, and yet I didn’t see a solution. And also I hadn’t found a potential collaborator. I kept on meeting writers, poets, film director, yet it almost always never went beyond the first one or two conversations. Until I met Martin Crimp.

Martin is a very special artist and a very special person. At the time we first met, he had just finished a series of plays and so was open to doing something different. He didn’t know opera very well, but he loves music deeply and in fact is a very fine musician himself, a pianist. I think we met at a happy moment – though I wish it could have been 15 years before, so I could have written many operas by now! But I carry on and write as much as I can.  

Yes. It would be impossible in real life. The way that things unfold is far from realistic. It’s a fable which inhabits a magic world.

Yes, absolutely. The degree of volatility in structure and mood was a real challenge for me… I felt the need almost to change my language from scene to scene.

I recall how Messiaen adored contact with his students and how he would say, in the most modest way, that he taught to learn from his young students. It also gave him a very special sense of joy to help his students make progress, not to impose anything on them but to open up avenues so they could find themselves. And I now really do understand that myself. I’ve been teaching at King’s College London for over twenty years and quite quickly individual lessons – along with analysis classes – became the priority for me. And now over a dozen of my students have publishers and are performed and commissioned on the international music scene. It’s impossible to make a composer, but perhaps I’m able to be of use technically, helping their inner ear, understanding of instruments and orchestration, facing the challenges of notation, stretching their minds… If, once they come to me, the quality and quantity of their creative work improves, it’s a wonderful feeling. I’m extremely isolated when I compose and so this contact with young composers means a great amount to me and gives me much pleasure. I now absolutely understand my own teacher’s feelings.

I’m still in close contact with Alexander Goehr. He’s 90 now, but his mind is still as clear as crystal. Before Messiaen, I had another wonderful teacher from the German tradition: Peter Gellhorn, who emigrated to England from Berlin in the late 1930s. His own teacher knew Brahms! Gellhorn was very interested in new music and, in the U.K. of the 70s and 80s, that meant a lot of French music. So, in a way, I was nurtured between Germany and France throughout my musical youth.

I love to conduct.and relish close contact with musicians, though I have to plan carefully when I do this. As a composer, I need uninterrupted silence and seclusion in order to write – and conducting is the antithesis of this! I recall my first conversation at length with Pierre Boulez when I was still very young. I always think of this meeting. We had dinner together in London when I was about 25. And I asked him – to this huge figure, great musician, enormous thinker, famous conductor, magnificent composer: „Have you any advice for me? “ And he said „Yes. Write.“ And I said „What do you mean? „Write. Make sure that you write enough. Write lots of music, as much as you can!“ I think a lot about that now. 

And I believe that I’m the 50th. The second one was Olivier Messiaen, my teacher. I never any direct contact with Britten, as he died when I was 16 years old.  

A huge amount. I wasn’t expecting it, and I was incredibly surprised when Wolfgang Rihm called me on behalf of the Ernst von Siemens Foundation. I couldn’t believe it. Obviously, it a very great honour, and I’m very touched and grateful. But also I’m a British composer and there’s quite a lot of distance between our musical cultures. There are many wonderful musical traditions in European music, but the German one is the greatest. And so to receive this award was unexpected for me and such a tribute moves me deeply.