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The Angry Planet. The Angry Planet is acollaboration between Charles Bennett and composer/conductor Bob Chilcott. The poems capture poignant and powerful aspects of landscape to develop a mood of celebration and mourning. Through a vivid and haunting blend of dream-vision poetry, mischievous riddles and difficult questions, they explore our relationship with the natural world through evoking a journey through darkness towards dawn.

Key moments in the sequence give voice to endangered species, as well as celebrating the overlooked. The elegiac character of the poems, which include a requiem for the dead in the animal kingdom, is balanced with swagger in the dramatic monologues for weeds, and these opposing registers are themselves working against poems with a pithy, angry character. The whole sequence ends with the word ‘Perhaps.’

The libretto developed in three inter-related stages. Presented with artistic and thematic parameters through the brief, my initial concept was a journey through darkness towards light. Concerned to develop environmental impact in a meaningful rather than simplistically negative way, I was also aware of the need for an extended, coherent structure. I therefore began work on five lyrics representing a particular time of night: 6pm, 9pm, midnight, 3am and 6am.

These pieces achieved internal unity through first person narration. Within this narrative I engaged with a dream vision trope, and this allowed me to insert dramatic monologue, voiced for creatures at differing levels of endangerment: slow worm, wild cat, horseshoe bat, corncrake and otter.

The above pieces demanded extensive background research, and during this process I generated a second level of texts addressing artistic and pragmatic issues. Since children were involved, I provided them with stand-alone dedicated pieces. This provided the composer with musical opportunities and allowed me to develop a complementary strand to environmental content by writing ‘flower songs’ spoken by weeds. The approach to the lyric was simpler and also mischievous, making it direct appealing to children.

Later in the composition, Bob Chilcott asked me to provide some ‘darker’ material, to balance the children’s pieces and provide a more general political slant. I then wrote four ‘bitter songs’, using irony and a viewpoint which represented collective responsibility. The lyric demonstrated levels of carelessness and unconcern with environmental issues, and highlighted prodigality and the stance of global capitalism.

In the end we were able (with the additional of a balanced coda which hinged on the word ‘perhaps’) to give not only a satisfying musical dimension to an extended composition, but a lyrical depth which explored a series of attitudes to ecological threat and environmental damage.