Page 74 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

of Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Conversations With Friends and for the 2016
film Lady Macbeth. “I’m in awe of writers. Getting the most perfect sentence, the most
perfect phrase, a resonant way with words. The idea of writing an opera with someone
who has that particular quality is very exciting, and Alice has it in spades.”

For someone who says he is no good at making things up, Coult’s work so far seems to
suggest an enduring interest in made-up things. I Find Planets, written last year, sets
words generated by a Twitterbot that announces a new imaginary planet every hour;
both Codex (Homage to Serafini) and Rainbow-Shooting Cloud Contraption, written in
2013, drew on his fascination with the Italian artist Luigi Serafini and his lavishly
illustrated compendium of imagined things, an encyclopedia from a parallel universe.
Another inspiration has been Heath Robinson, whose mechanical contraptions aren’t
entirely fantastical but might as well be. And in St John’s Dance – a BBC commission
that opened the 2017 Proms – his starting point was the unexplained medieval
phenomenon of groups of people spontaneously dancing themselves into a frenzy until
they collapsed.

Violet is the first opera for both Coult and Birch – “so it’s not a first language for either
of us – I’m excited by that”. Coult has been preparing for it for several years, however.
As a postgraduate student at King’s College London, he studied with George Benjamin,
who had just finished his own, internationally successful opera Written on Skin. What
did he take away from those studies? “Knowing where things sit in someone’s voice, and
what is intelligible in different ranges of the voice. That was stuff I tried to think about a
lot while writing Violet.”

The premise of Violet’s story fits in with Coult’s earlier works, in that it’s a subversion of
objective rationality: the residents of a small, inward-looking village find that time itself
is “developing holes”, at a rate of one more hour each day. “The first hour to go is
midnight to one, then midnight to two,” he says. “By about day 20 there are no more
daylight hours left. Day 23 is just one hour long. There’s something terrifying about it as
a concept: when something that is supposed to be objective starts to decay.” As for the
title role, “Violet is the only character who, rather than being merely terrified, is sort of
elated. She’s in a stultifying marriage in a stultifying village, and the way she sees this,
at least something is happening.”

Imagining the most wonderful sounds that I possibly can – that’s what gets me out of bed in the
morning

Around Violet, however, things quickly begin to fall apart – which made the story seem
oddly prescient when Coult realised that the opera’s planned premiere in summer 2020
would be indefinitely postponed. “There’s a lot in Violet about just how quickly society
can break down. It was very odd to see that happening and have that as the reason our
production was cancelled.” Coult looked on as 2020 went from being his big year to
being a year of next to no performances.

Another big 2020 work, his violin concerto Pleasure Garden, was belatedly premiered
by Daniel Pioro and the BBC Philharmonic last year (the London Philharmonic brings it
to the Royal Festival Hall in October). That was the first of three big commissions Coult
has lined up as composer-in-association with the BBC Phil, a role he’s clearly enjoying.
“After the pandemic and after having to write for solo players or for Zoom