The opera AWAKENING, frenetically applauded after its world premiere at the Bonn Opera on March 1, was thirty-two years in the making.
Back in 1994, Param Vir and David Rudkin agreed to collaborate on an opera about the Buddha. The composer and the librettist worked on sixteen versions of the work. Eventually commissioned for the Beethoven year 2020, it was postponed when that became the pandemic year. The production was so elaborate that it couldn’t be squeezed into a season to follow – until now.
Perseverance, patience and impermanence being hallmarks of the Buddhist tradition, the delay didn’t seem to matter much. What are thirty-two years anyway in light of a story that goes back thousands, and with a philosophy where only the present matters?
AWAKENING is a play within a play: Occupied by a foreign power in a wartime setting, interrupted by air raids, an underground theater troupe clings to its forbidden culture by performing a ritualistic play about the ancient teachings of an enlightened one – thus bringing Siddhartha Gautama‘s biography and teachings right into our time.
The timing of the premiere in Bonn was uncanny, if unintentional: missiles, explosions and rubble onstage synchronous with the real thing that had broken out in the Middle East only thirty-six hours before.
British dramatist David Rudkin initially balked at the idea. „When Param Vir first invited me to write an opera about the Buddha, I said, ‚You must be joking because that is the most undramatic subject ever. The most undramatic man, the most undramatic life.‘ But PV has a way of making things happen.“
With the libretto undergoing many changes, what precipitated the final version? It was when Rudkin accessed the primary source of Buddhist teaching, the Pali Canon. „Once I got hold of that, there was an energy that nothing else could give me.“
Of course, it’s not easy to speak of primary sources in what remained an oral tradition until finally being written down 500-700 years after the Buddha’s passing. We now think of the written word as lasting and of the spoken word as unreliable and subject to change and error, but that discounts how human memory works – or once worked. The ancient word-of-mouth tradition finds its parallel in AWAKENING when the theater troupe, whose books have been destroyed, pass along knowledge in spoken presentations.
What began as a labor of love only much later received a commission, says Param Vir. „We wanted somebody who really wanted to do this. And that’s what Theater Bonn did. The opera is full of heart, and the Bonn Opera Director Bernhard Helmich is a heartfelt human being.“
Born in New Delhi and living in London, the composer explained that his musical orientation in the work was Western: „I didn’t want to imitate Indian music. It doesn’t work, can become a pastiche.“
Unlike his partner, Param Vir didn’t find a dearth of drama in the life of the central character. „You can take these simple episodes and turn them into dramatic scenarios. For example, when the Enlightened One is challenged by The Ploughman. Or when the vexed monk throws irrelevant intellectual questions at him, like ‚Is the world finite or infinite?‘ Or when his speaking horse sadly takes his leave.“
Vir explains that he broadly used different compositional idioms for the three phases of the Buddha’s life. „The first was when he was a prince. Here I employed the complete gamut of orchestral and harmonic material. The second is when he became an ascetic in the wilderness, so here I used very simple intervals to mirror the simplicity of the life he’s leading. Finally there’s the enlightened Buddha, where I sometimes established harmonic fields constructed in such a way that they are iconic.“
„But at some point towards the end I didn’t need any strategy,“ adds Vir. „Sometimes I saw composers – Stravinsky, Mozart, Bach – just walking past my window and the music fell on my score! I didn’t copy anything, but it was in my memory. In India we have a tradition where we pay homage to our teachers. And these are the great teachers of the past.“
At the beginning of their collaboration, Param Vir took David Rudkin to India to visit the iconic sites of the Buddha’s life – and repeated the journey in 2019 with Vasily Barkhatov. The Russian stage director, now in heavy demand on Europe’s opera stages, created iconic scenes for the besieged community in a dystopian landscape, like a shipping lock with crane and gravel-filled shovel. The Buddha’s Enlightenment occurs not under a fruit tree but on a pile of rubble.
Over the course of the play, the actors gradually morph into the characters they depict. The play becomes the real thing, or at the very least, the viewer asks himself: What is real, and what is play-acting?
Depicting the central character, bass-baritone Cody Quaddlebaum exudes a stark, singular aura. As does soprano Yannick-Muriel Noah in the role of his stepmother Lady Gautami.
Though not describing himself as a Buddhist, David Rudkin is fascinated by the teachings: „I think they are the best ethical framework. I thought these ideas need communicating.“
Often misunderstood as a feel-good religion, Buddhism is challenging, adds Rudkin. „It’s a very tough proposition because you’ve got to look inside and see where the truth is.“ But what does the philosophy, or this piece, have to say to us now? „You find answers in the so-called eightfold path, which for instance insists on truthfulness in thought. Or truthful livelihood, which means no traffic in weapons, poison or slaves. Well, just think of Jeffrey Epstein.“
At the end, missiles slowly descend on the characters, but are frozen mid-air as though the singing had suspended gravity.
In sounds ranging from delicate to detonation, Daniel Johannes Mayr led the Beethoven Orchestra.
The audience went wild. Standing ovations. Maybe we all needed a bit of truth – or Awakening.