Page 109 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

Music became a way for me to escape. When I practiced or performed all of my symptoms would
completely stop. I used music as a self-therapy and composition became an important creative
outlet for me. It’s perhaps no surprise then that in my work as a composer I am often drawn to
stories about outsiders; people who just don’t quite fit in, people who are misunderstood.

My first opera The Monstrous Child with librettist Francesca Simon based on her book of the same name, is
about the ultimate outsider: the Norse goddess of the dead, Hel. The half-alive, half-dead daughter of Loki and
sister to her monstrous brothers the snake Jörmungandr and the wolf Fenrir. She’s an angry, emo teenager with
a sarcastic voice whose body is rotting from the waist down, banished to the underworld by the god Odin
(pictured below by Stephen Cummiskey: a scene from the Royal Opera production).

Francesca and I have teamed up once again on a cantata for two singers and orchestra, The Faerie Bride,
which has its first performance tonight at the Aldeburgh Festival. Written for Marta Fontanals-Simmons, Roderick
Williams, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, it is inspired by the Welsh myth of Llyn y Fan Fach, a "lady
of the lake" tale about a faerie who doesn’t fit in and refuses to conform. The piece begins at the lake, a liminal
place where the human and faerie worlds meet.

The Man sees The Woman sitting on the water and falls instantly in love. The Woman warns him "I am wild. It’s
not easy to catch me", but agrees to marry him on one condition; that he does not strike her three times. If he
does, she will return to the lake forever. He agrees — "not one blow, not ever" — but he has not listened
carefully enough, he has misunderstood that not all blows are physical. She leaves the lake followed by a motley
dowry of otherworldly cows, sheep, horses and pigs. They marry and move to the village, but she is too strange
and doesn’t fit in. She runs barefoot, she swims naked, she waves at the moon, she talks to the cows, she sings
strange songs.