Output details

The Lightning Rod Man - An Opera in One Act

My one act opera The Lightning Rod Man is an adaptation of a short story by Herman Melville. In a 50/50 collaboration with librettist Amy Parker, we attempted to reframe what we saw as the existential crisis latent in Melville’s story by inventing a third character whose own anxiety mediates and amplifies the dilemma between the two worldviews represented in the original: a traditional worldview, one based in myth, poetry, faith, nature and a respect for the divine order and that of the Lightning Rod Man himself, representing all that is modern, technological, progressive and capitalistic. In our version the new character introduces classical alienation effects through commenting on and interpreting the positions of the other characters, but he becomes increasingly unable to decide who is in the right. In the last scene Melville’s two characters turn on the narrator and compound his dilemma.

The appeal of this story for research enquiry was to examine how an opera could be organized around ideas, and philosophical and literary references. Our dramaturgical approach was to favour a Brechtian understanding of theatrical staging, rather than what we see as the mistaken belief that opera is the medium for naturalistic sentiments, and or as a vehicle for ‘raw emotional power’ which seemed to so dominate production ideas at Scottish Opera. I was 100% responsible for the music. I looked to older operatic conventions: especially aria and recitative. I also rejected the highly conventional espressivo and seriousness of contemporary opera, and opted for a lighter, comic musical style, drawing on obvious parts of American vernacular: Copland, the blues, Spirituals, and minimalism. But, using developing variation, I kept genre codes in flux; the score performs its own form of stylistic indecision.