Basel-born composer Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini truly loves opera. A range of different art forms come together under the opera umbrella and Scartazzini’s music is admirably suited to the emotionality to be found in the genre. The 45-year-old writes compact and consummately structured pieces of music that, while highly dramatic, constantly offer gentle, psychological stretches as a contrast to the helter-skelter of emotion. Scartazzini’s intricate landscapes of the soul include his second opera, THE SANDMAN, based on a story by E.T.A. Hoffmann and which had its world premiere in 2012 at the Theater Basel. EDWARD II, based on a play by Christopher Marlowe, is his third opera after WUT and THE SANDMAN. The Elizabethan drama recounts the tragedy surrounding King Edward, who, for a number or reasons that included his homosexual love affair, was brought down in a lethal vortex of intrigues emanating from Mortimer, Earl of March, and the Bishop of Coventry. The successful SANDMAN team has been reassembled to produce EDWARD II, a piece commissioned by the Deutsche Oper Berlin. The libretto is the work of dramatist Thomas Jonigk, and Christof Loy, an old master in the finest sense of the word, directs. In Scartazzini’s studio in Basel, with the finished score to hand, we discuss the historical material, the libretto and the composition.

After THE SANDMAN, EDWARD II is the third opera you’ve written and another instance of you taking a work of literature and constructing a kind of nocturne. What is it about Christopher Marlowe’s 1591/92 play, “Edward II”, that grabs you?
Choosing the material was not the result of a rational decision. When Dietmar Schwarz, the Director of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, asked me what subject I could imagine tackling for my next opera, I spontaneously mentioned “Edward II”. Derek Jarman made a fantastic film about the queer king - aesthetic in the extreme, archaic, theatrical. I saw it in the cinema in the early ‘90s, when I was busy with my own coming out, and I never forgot it.

As a composer, do you have to be selecting material that is suitable for musical expression?
Clearly the material has to provide me with a basis for making dramatic, stirring music. Unlike SANDMAN, which is a psychological drama and hence an intimate piece of theatre and which is quite puzzling in a way, with its blend of dream and reality, the thing about EDWARD that attracts me is the bluntness and directness of the story.

Is EDWARD II a kind of horror story?
Oh yes, especially the ending, when Edward is murdered in bestial fashion. In a reference to his sexual orientation he has a red-hot poker rammed through the shell of a cow’s horn and up his rectum. But there’s a surprising twist in the libretto at that point.

In our day and age, when - at least in western Europe - homosexuality is socially accepted or at least tolerated, doesn’t that kind of material seem a little antiquated?
I don’t just want to write an opera about homosexuality. I see the play as being as much about the triangular relationship between Isabella, Edward and Gaveston. All of them are sketched as ambivalent characters. When Edward is cold and hostile towards his wife, Isabella, in the first scene, I sympathise more with her because she’s being marginalised. Even in Marlowe’s day, pre-1600, the real scandal in the eyes of the theatre-going public would have been not the homosexuality but the fact that Gaveston, Edward’s lover, was an arriviste, a man of humble birth. Yes, we should be wondering if a centuries-old story is not perhaps outdated, but in this case we’re dealing with issues that are still relevant today. And we can’t shut our eyes to the fact, either, that Marlowe’s play and its adaptations in recent years have been increasingly present on the stage. And to go back to your original question: when Thomas Jonigk and I began working on EDWARD II, thousands of people were demonstrating in France against the legal recognition of homosexual partnerships. It looks like the subject isn’t that antiquated after all.

But would it be fair to say that the subject of homosexuality is the reason why the work has stuck in your memory?
Since the year dot the vast majority of literature’s stories about relationships have revolved around the classic hetero set-up. Which is why I don’t consider it wrong to broaden the spectrum a little, especially in the area of musical theatre. Apart from Britten’s works, there are few operas that explore alternative ways of loving. And it’s not exactly weird that, as a composer, I should choose material that I can identify with on a personal level. By the way, I also remember a documentary on homosexuality [The Celluloid Closet], that ran in the cinemas and shows that, until recently, gay love was almost always presented as unfulfilled and doomed to failure. Ok, Edward’s love for Gaveston didn’t bring them ultimate happiness, but in the libretto a peaceful setting ends up being superimposed over the archaic plot.

The clash between political affairs and responsibility, which Edward clearly neglects, and the protagonist’s own desire is a classic theme in the history of opera. We find it in the royal dramas of the Baroque period, in bel canto opera, with Giuseppe Verdi and other composers. Was this conflict also important to you when choosing the material?
No. On the contrary, if anything it would be a reason not to choose the material, because I think we’ve moved beyond this clash of urges now and it’s not so relevant for most people. It’s only relevant in the sense that Edward places his love for Gaveston, his personal happiness, above everything else. That shows courage.

So it is the relationships aspect that interests you most?
Yes, but as a composer I must add the caveat that our conversation up till now, which has been more on the level of literary theory, is crucial to understanding the play. But I opt for a particular material primarily because it’s my path to creating music. The Edward story, especially in Thomas Jonigk’s text form, is a mine of material for me: as well as hate speech, nightmares, enigmatic stuff and toying with sexual clichés, it also offers the possibility of love and personal happiness. And for precisely that reason I need the switch from a major choral scene to an intimate constellation made up of two people. Or the switch from intoxicating, sweeping music to introverted moments, and back. That creates contrasts. The same goes for emotionally charged drama interspersed with tomfoolery, something that Jonigk has taken from Elizabethan theatre.

And librettist Jonigk has added an angel to the work …
… the metaphysical angel character as a beautiful transvestite, who appears with increasing frequency as the opera progresses and ends up accompanying Edward as he meets his fate. It wasn’t easy finding a musical expression for the character, who also has something camp about him. I plumped for giving him a slightly eerie, sinister aura.

Apart from the central characters and the broad strokes of the storyline, the libretto has little in common with Marlowe’s original. Jonigk has drastically pared down the play and the number of characters who appear in it. Has he created a literary text that focuses entirely on Edward II and his emotional conflicts?
Alone the length of the opera - roughly 90 minutes - would have justified the paring down, and focusing on the key characters is important. Some of the issues dealt with in Marlowe’s piece are no longer relevant to today’s audiences. Edward’s character and what’s going on inside his head are what we’re interested in. But Jonigk also draws on other historical sources that touch on homosexuality in the Middle Ages. The fruit of this research can be seen, for instance, in a short scene in which two counsellors have a hilarious discussion about whether an official case can be made for prosecuting on the grounds of “sodomy”, as male-to-male love was called at the time. Then there’s the classic Jonigk-ian irony, which I love, like when Mortimer, Edward’s arch enemy and the new strong man at Isabella’s side, comments drily on life with her and her son, the young Edward III: “Uncle, mother and a wily stepson: we make the perfect family.” It’s passages like that that give the story of Edward a modern dimension on top of the historical drama.

In his capacity as the librettist of your THE SANDMAN, Jonigk adapted E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novella for a modern audience. Can the same be said of EDWARD II?
Today, if you want to tell an old story, you have to update it and infuse it with its own, fresh character. We’ve already touched on the focus on the emotional situation and how the characters materialised. At the end of the opera he introduces a second time layer, our present day, interweaving it with the mediaeval storyline. While Edward stares death in the face, the room fills with the murmur and buzz of a crowd of visitors strolling through the historic site centuries later. In Marlowe’s work, the old order is reasserted with Edward’s death and the punishment meted out later to his murderers. With Jonigk things are left open. This motley group of tourists, which includes a modern-day Gaveston and his partner, can be read as representing an open, peaceable society, which is one way of expressing and portraying the right of individual to pursue their own idea of happiness.

The guides are presumably a theatrical distancing device, the way they deliver their stock descriptions of how Edward was languishing in prison in 1327 and was then bestially murdered.
To show Edward being killed in grisly fashion with a red-hot poker onstage would be to risk a degree of unintended humour. Depicting horrific events onstage usually backfires. Jonigk hit upon a much better, much more refined solution. The ending is also good for me, as I’m free to write music reflecting other strands of feeling now that all the emotional turmoil is over.

How much influence do you have over the libretto?
Few professions give the practitioner as much creative freedom as that enjoyed by the composer. I don’t have a client telling me up front or after the fact what I should be doing or should change or shouldn’t have done in the first place. And in the same way that a composer is trusted, I trust the librettist. You could say we’re a team, two people providing autonomous input to achieve a common goal. Jonigk’s words stand up as a work in their own right, and in time he becomes a kind of interlocutor whom I engage with. I want to rub up against his work and be inspired by it. The libretto allows me to find my own musical form, one which chimes with the text in one moment and moves in another direction the next. Obviously we stake out the territory before we start, but we don’t run through the work scene by scene until the libretto’s finished. It’s then that I can suggest alterations, but they have to do with small details based on musical decisions I’ve come to. The libretto originally began with a storm, but that’s been done before by Giuseppe Verdi, in his OTELLO, and I can’t compete with that. So I needed another motif and ended up creating a backdrop of uncanny noises and a variety of percussion sounds, with everything growing and intensifying until you’d think the walls were about to collapse around us.

With your music, do you uncover layers of character in your protagonists that are inaccessible from a reading of the mere text? Do you transpose into sound what the characters are not expressing in word?
Naturally the music should express internal processes that can’t be rendered in word. But I’m not just giving the protagonists personality when I compose; with my music I’m also creating an ambience within which they act and react. For instance, there’s a point where I have three trumpets accompanying Isabella as she sings of her sorrow at her disillusionment in love. Much later in the opera, when Isabella has wrested power back again with Mortimer, I use this passage again. The music tells us that Isabella’s emotional state is as sorrowful as it was before. Nothing has changed.

Christian Fluri, born 1950, resides in Basel. From 1989 to 2015 he was Culture editor-in-chief at bzBasel/bzBasellandschaftliche Zeitung with a focus on music, opera, fine arts and cultural politics. He was publisher of “Herbert Wernicke - Director, Costumer, Set Designer” Schwabe Verlag Basel, 2011. Since 2016 he has been a freelance writer.