Page 78 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

the clock strikes 13 and they toyed with the idea of using this, but then hit upon going in the opposite
direction and having fewer and fewer hours in the day. So, in the opera, the story is told in 24
increasingly short days and by the time we reach Day 23, this is only one hour long. There is no day
24! Time corkscrews inwards till the end of time and space. This is a strong concept, but Tom feels
that Alice has imbued it with character and humanity, so the text explores how the villagers deal with
this ending of time.

As a composer, time is important to Tom 'to a certain extent', after all, it is the canvas of a piece, the
basic medium. But it is the accoutrements of time, sounds and mechanisms, that are of interest to him
and he is interested in the work of composers such as Ravel, Ligeti and Birtwistle who were similarly
interested. What fascinated Tom is the way the ruthless objectivity of a metronome or a clock can
meet artistic time. In the opera, clock time malfunctions, so that something whose character should be
most reliable becomes liquid. And this Tom finds really interesting.

What Tom love's about Alice's plays is their terseness and economy, and these are virtues that you
need to have in a libretto. In her text, everything is very precise and tightly organised, but there are
also wild flights of imagery that can dazzle you. For the libretto, Tom wanted some juicy imagery and
turns of phrase, and Alice has definitely given him some. But there is darkness too, along with
humanity and empathy.

Tom Coult: Violet in rehearsal with director Jude Christian (Photo Patrick Young / Britten Pears Arts)

In 2018, they were lucky enough to be able to workshop the opera as part of the Jerwood Opera
Writing Programme at Snape. Tom wrote about 25 minutes of music and they had four singers and a
full band (the Britten Sinfonia). At that point, Alice had not written the whole libretto. Part of the
importance of the workshop, for Tom, was that he was thus able to show Alice what he had been
working on. Afterwards, they made changes, altered some of the later trajectory of the story and even
removed one character. The very end of the opera Tom left entirely to Alice, and he was genuinely