Page 51 - Coverage Book_Aurora Orchestra Autumn 2020

this . . . How harshly was I repulsed by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing, and yet it
was impossible for me to say to men, ‘Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf.’ ” In German, the last

exclamation has a percussive finality: “Sprecht lauter, schreit, denn ich bin taub!”

Richard Ayres’s Peter Pan in Stuttgart in 2013
REX FEATURES
The 54-year-old British composer Richard Ayres, whose opera Peter Pan was performed by

Welsh National Opera in 2015 and acclaimed in a five-star review by Richard Morrison in The
Times as “brilliant, grotesque, surreal and deeply disturbing in all the right Freudian corners”,

doesn’t put himself on the same plane as Beethoven. Yet on a human level he understands well

what the German composer felt. Because of Ayres’s own worsening deafness, his experience of

socialising and of sharing music together has also been crushed. “Socially it’s killed me,” he

says when we talk on the phone. “I hardly go out. If I’m in a group of people, I can’t really
follow anything that’s going on — it’s just a mess.”

Ayres has a complicated patchwork of conditions that have caused his hearing loss, including

childhood scarring, infections and the effects of ageing (his father is also very deaf). He’d been

aware for several years that it was getting worse, “but I sort of ignored it. I’m not Beethoven. I

always thought, ‘Well, I could go do anything, do something else.’ Then I tried to take a year’s
sabbatical and I went completely nuts. It taught me I have to compose every day just for my

sanity. That’s when I began to take notice of my hearing loss and own up to it a bit.”