Sebastian Black: The Sun

I wrote this when I was in the third year of my undergrad for my friend Sebastian Black's first opera. It premiered in Christ Church Cathedral in November 2016 alongside Bach's Actus Tragicus and my own revised-libretto version of Stravinsky's A Soldier's Tale, which I directed. Turns out I'm a pretty dreadful director, but I was pleased with my libretto. Collapsing the parts of the Devil and the Narrator into one speaker, I removed virtually all of the dialogue by rendering the Soldier his mute plaything. After the raw intensity of The Sun, Kitty Black and Michael Flanders's twee original translation would have been very jarring indeed.

The Sun opens onto a scene of domestic devastation. Up to this point in Ibsen’s originary Ghosts, the life of the recently deceased Captain Alving--Helene’s husband and Oswald’s father--has been incrementally revealed to have been one of adultery and irresponsibility. His hedonistic lifestyle was kept secret by Mrs Alving because of her obsession with keeping up appearances. We not only discover that Oswald has inherited syphilis from his father, but that the Captain fathered the family’s maid and Oswald’s love interest, Regina Engstrand. In other words, he has fallen in love with his half-sister.

These are the “ghosts” that haunt Oswald and his mother: the revenant past of a man who has already died before the curtain rises; his breaches of moral obligation and social responsibility. Staring into the void of his terminal illness, Oswald despairs at the prospect of his eventual vegetative state--of “having to be fed like a baby”. Explaining to his mother that he suffers from “attacks”, he asks her to euthanise him with an overdose of morphine in order to end his suffering from his disease. As the night draws to a close and the sun begins to rise, his “attack” begins. Mrs Alving must confront the future of the breaking day: to watch her son suffer or to help him die.

Ghosts is a play of revelation: a slow unscrolling of truths that are already known by the point at which The Sun begins. By choosing to musically dramatise this, Sebastian has drawn upon the characters’ impotent state of arrested development to create an intensely phrenic conversation between mother and son: where overt action is nearly absent, an impossible psychological anguish is teased apart.

When Ghosts premiered, it horrified audiences. The frank discussion of venereal disease, incest, and attack on 19th-century societal mores led the Daily Telegraph in 1882 to describe it as, "positively abominable .... An open drain: a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly .... Gross, almost putrid indecorum .... Literary carrion .... Crapulous stuff.” While the tone of some Telegraph reviewers may not have changed much since then, Ghosts’ uncompromising confrontation with social responsibility and suffering is now widely recognised as bold and compelling. Tonight’s world premiere of Sebastian’s setting brings to this already rich dramatic landscape a musical insight that promises to be fascinating, challenging, and moving in equal measure.