Gerald Barry: One man's rage against old age

Gerald Barry's new opera, The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit, will open the Aldeburgh Festival next Monday. Nick Kimberley asks the composer, now 50, why he has taken a stand for pleasure against the inevitability of time's decay

The baroque era loved allegorical narratives with an element of sentimental uplift; and Handel's oratorio The Triumph of Time and Truth fitted the bill perfectly. It's an elaborate musical fantasy in which the figure of Beauty, having at first sworn allegiance to Pleasure, eventually sees the error of her ways. Despite the wiles of Deceit, she succumbs to the righteous charms of Time and Truth, her final words imploring the angels, "... in Virtue's path direct me, while resigned to Heaven above. Let no more this world deceive me, nor let idle passions grieve me, strong in faith, in hope, in love."

While Handel's audience revelled in such pieties, modern listeners are more sceptical. In the age of Botox, we are not so ready to give in to time, let alone truth, and we quite enjoy our idle passions. No wonder, then, that the Irish composer Gerald Barry loaded the dice differently when he wrote his opera The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit. A lifelong devotee of Handel, he readily concedes the appeal of the earlier piece: "I was looking for a subject for an opera, and The Triumph of Time and Truth leapt out at me as a marvellous subject. It speaks profoundly about the business of ageing, the flight of time, the need to seize the present before it's too late."

In this, Barry's 50th birthday year, the subject perhaps acquires extra poignancy. Yet he did not set out simply to rewrite Handel's plot; with the help of his librettist, Meredith Oakes, he had to make it his own: "I took a stubborn stance against Time's inevitability, and enjoyed having Pleasure win. It amused me to stand things on edge, although it's not quite that simple. I think the ending of my opera is rather ambiguous; it seems to suggest that Pleasure wins the day, but it's not a better world because of that."

Barry wrote the piece in 1995, not for the opera house, but for television: Channel 4 commissioned it as one of six operas written for TV. Except that is not how Barry approached it: "They were supposed to be conceived specifically in terms of television, but I ignored all that and wrote as if I was writing for the stage. Realising an opera on stage can be much more interesting than taking advantage of television's too-easy technologies. I have always found television opera very dull, though it doesn't have to be like that. If you think of the films of Samuel Beckett's plays, for example, you see how exciting television can be when the medium itself is taken seriously."

Donald Taylor Black's film of the opera took the Handelian connection as a cue for some entertaining high campery, but Barry confesses that he found it over-emphatic. Now he has the opportunity to see his opera in the context for which he conceived it, a live staging: the work is about to receive its stage premiere in Nigel Lowery's production, which opens this year's Aldeburgh Festival, and later comes to London before travelling to Berlin.

It will be interesting to see how German audiences respond. In the 1970s, Barry studied in Germany with Karlheinz Stockhausen, but his jumpy, jittery music sounds nothing like Stockhausen's. Nor does his opera resemble Handel, except, he acknowledges, in one respect: "The extreme virtuosity of the singing demands brilliant coloratura, which might hark back to the vocal techniques of Handel's time. Virtuosity has always fascinated me. I remember collaborating with a singer in Germany, who was a nightmare to work with, but who acquired a sort of divinity as soon as she stepped onstage. There are people who are born with that quality, and it is a kind of divine thing. Part of the opera's conceit is that if the singing and music are virtuosic enough, they will somehow suspend the passage of time, like an elixir."

Barry's music certainly makes demands on the performers. For The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit, his pit band is light on strings, but heavy on wind instruments, which provide a Stravinskian astringency that is bracing and seductive. The singers, meanwhile, must sing at breakneck speeds, yet without garbling Meredith Oakes' witty and often moving text. As Barry says, "The performers may complain bitterly, but if they feel it's worth it, they usually pull through."

While The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit is an all-male opera, Barry's current operatic project has an all-female cast. Based on Rainer Werner Fassbinder's play (and eventually film), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant receives a partial premiere later this year, when Act Two of what will eventually be a five-act opera is performed in Dublin and at the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music.

Barry elected to set every word of Fassbinder's text (in Denis Calandra's translation). As he suggests, "Fassbinder's feeling for the delivery and pacing of text was so right that all I needed to do was to follow him. I observed every comma, dash and full stop with the requisite musical pause, and that has been a marvellous safety net. Every time I didn't observe that rule, something went wrong.

"The play is about a woman, Petra von Kant, who falls in love with another woman. They have both left their husbands, and it's easy to see why Petra is blinded by love; yet everyone but she can see disaster looming. It's tremendously dramatic, tragic and funny; and as an opera composer you can't do better than that."

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group performs Gerald Barry's 'The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit' at the Aldeburgh Festival, 7 June (01728 687110; www.aldebrugh.co.uk), and at Almeida Opera, London N1, 27 June, 1, 2 & 4 July (020 7359 4404). Both festivals feature other Barry works