Miroslav Srnka’s Make No Noise was premiered as part of the Munich Opera Festival in the Pavillon 21 Mini Opera Space of Bavarian State Opera: a chamber opera about the search for communication between people.
Make No Noise tells the story of a young woman who is caring for a man seriously injured in a fire on an oil platform. She is almost deaf, and he bears the blame for the death of his best friend who died in the fire on the platform. Neither has any words for the events which have altered their lives abruptly. Both have found a bearable way of dealing with their respective pasts – silence. When they meet on the shut down oil rig, they sense in their unique connection a way of being able to live with their traumas. Make No Noise is the story of a coming together, the beginning of a communication, a healing.
Miroslav Srnka’s opera project began as a kind of “enquiry into communication”. The evening-length chamber opera has its roots in a quasi-international discourse about music theatre – between an Australian director, a writer (then) living in Norway and the Czech composer Miroslav Srnka. In 2007, Srnka and the director Matthew Lutton were awarded one of the much sought-after Jerwood Fellowships from Aldeburgh Music, which enabled the young artists to conceive a music theatre piece as a team, and which also included workshops and study trips they undertook together. At this stage they were joined by the writer Tom Holloway. This model of support represents an attractive alternative to the conventional commission for a composition, for it allows, as Srnka describes, “a great freedom, for the composer is not the sole important individual sitting alone in front of a sheet of paper. The realisation of the work for the stage is a part of the process of composition, that is to say, a step towards a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ really takes place. We work together on all aspects of the piece, striving to create a consistent whole which develops out of the collaboration.” This creative process becomes, in a very far-reaching sense, formative for the work.
Quite fundamental questions about music theatre form the starting point. Srnka: “At the beginning of our work were a few premisses which influenced the whole creative process. The questions: how does one develop an opera? Why have singing at all on the stage? What is the role of instrumental music? Why use sounds other than acoustically produced ones?”
Srnka describes the team work as a necessity: “We started from the point that a good music theatre piece can only be created if librettist, composer and director work together from the beginning. Out of this, the unique situation arose that I got to know the director of my piece before we even began to work on it. We were able to meet several times in Aldeburgh and twice in Australia, as well as going on a study trip to Copenhagen.”
The study trip to the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT) and the meeting with its founder Inge Genefke, winner of the Alternative Nobel Prize (Right Livelihood Award) in Copenhagen marked a turning point in the conception of the work: “The meeting with this incredibly impressive woman was the decisive transformation in the creative process. Until then, we had been working on an adaptation of the film The secret life of words by Isabel Coixet (in which Inge Genefke, as one of the main parts, is the only ‘real’ person in the story – as also in our opera). Since this meeting, we have been writing an independent work. We were allowed to meet some of her former trauma patients who have a long journey back into ‘normal’ life behind them. … In the middle of one of these journeys, we encounter our main heroine Hanna. The opera deals with a short section in which she attempts to articulate her life and trauma for the first time, and through this, coincidentally discovers the quite different traumatic experiences of her patient Joseph. It is precisely the development of the means of communication between the two which becomes the central theme of the opera. And naturally the relationship developing out of this communication.”
Out of this development results the musical conception of the opera, the manipulation of the voice. For both protagonists singing becomes the language which can show them a utopian way. “The question, ‘Why do we sing in opera?’ is answered through it: in order to gain a new means of articulating life through singing. The singing develops in the course of the opera – from the impossibility of producing vocal sounds, up to a free expression. This is also the key to my treatment of the voices: I allow them to go through several stages of ‘voice producing’. It also means that the voices are not limited to a specific contemporary vocal technique. On the contrary, the movement through different techniques becomes the dramatic basis of the treatment of the voices. Contrary to this, the ensemble music demonstrates everything which this communication prevents. That is to say, the ensemble performs a contrary development to the long developing line of the vocal parts: a long decrescendo. To this, a third, electronic layer is added: it represents a closed world of the title heroine which nobody else may enter … Yet perhaps, hopefully the audience.”
Marie Luise Maintz
(Translation: Elizabeth Robinson)
from [t]akte 1/2011