Page 550 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

12 August 2022

Leaving space for the music

Michael White

Imagining the end of time is never a productive exercise but a temptation
that attracts us all – including young composers like the noted Tom Coult,
whose first ever opera premiered at last month’s Aldeburgh Festival and was

an interesting essay in the Last Things, delicately balanced between whimsy,
pantomime and nightmare warning.

Its title, Violet, gave nothing away beyond the name of a character who,
though central to the plot, is more its servant than its mistress. She’s a

strangely disaffected woman who perceives that time is literally running out,
each day an hour shorter than the one before. While those around her see
this, not unreasonably, as a crisis that will sweep them into an abyss of
nothingness, she sees it as escape from a routine existence and sails out to

sea – presumably in the belief that nothingness will be better there.

Whether it proves to be so, we’re not told: this parable about the world’s
end brings no obvious promise of deliverance. Meanwhile the opera ends
with a stylistic jolt into the almost unrelated tailpiece of a film with images
of violence and banality. Perhaps they represent the aftermath of

nothingness, perhaps they indicate why things have come to this: it isn’t