Output details

Kommilitonen!

Commissioned by the Royal Academy of Music and the Juilliard School. Libretto by David Pountney. First performed by students of the Royal Academy of Music, Jane Glover (conductor), Royal Academy of Music, 18 March 2011. American premiere given by students of the Juilliard School, Anne Manson (conductor), 16 November 2011.

Kommilitonen! is underpinned by the exploration of two compositional questions. The first, how to write for, and make best use of, a cast and orchestra of advanced students from the Royal Academy of Music and the Juilliard School, required close collaboration with the students themselves and Jane Glover, Head of Opera at the Royal Academy of Music.

The second compositional question bears out Britten’s remark that to write successfully for the stage requires that the composer can write “many types of music”. The opera contains the widest range of musical grammar in order to create music that summons the spectator instantly to different epochs and cultures, and yet at no point is any ‘authentic’ material quoted, nor can one describe the music as pastiche in any meaningful sense. The fact that the score comes across with a sense of unified sensibility suggests that Davies’s style at its most ‘pure’ may result from a virtuosic level of stylistic impurity. The pursuit of stylistic pluralism in this context has been discussed before (not least by Alexander Goehr and indeed Davies himself) as a form of composing through ‘masks’: much as the costumed court jester can speak truthfully to a king, protected by his ‘act’ and his costume in a way that others are not.