Years of Bliss

“The thing about librettists with huge egos… Well, I’m sure I’ve got a vast ego myself! But I hope it doesn’t encroach upon my work, because I feel my job has been to create some sort of conduit between Peter Carey and Brett Dean… I think I’ve just poured some poison on my finger!”

I’m alarmed for Amanda Holden – the librettist for composer Brett Dean’s translation of Carey’s novel, Bliss, for the operatic stage. By contrast, she's remarkably unperturbed: “I’ve just been poisoning some garden weeds outside my front door. Don’t worry, I’ll live. It’s my left hand and I can write without that!”

And credit where it’s due: she finishes her point despite the toxic intrusion, nonchalantly concluding that “the composer is the boss,” and that “the librettist is a hack”.

But then, it’s perhaps just as well that Amanda Holden isn’t particularly flappable. Carey’s 80s novel (“a bit of a cult” on university campuses in the eighties) is a challenging work in itself, and I’m given brownie points for just having read it: “A lot of people fail at that particular fence – including quite a lot of people involved with the production! I found it dead difficult to read myself, actually,” she laughs.

It’s a surprising, if typically candid, admission – as is her disclosure that “I struggle in the literary department.” For Carey’s novel is, undoubtedly, an extraordinarily literary work and certainly not, on first reading, an operatic one. Ostensibly the story of a Harry Joy, an ad salesman who suffers a heart attack and awakes with the firm belief that he has died and gone to Hell, the novel not only grapples with difficult themes—cancer and modernity, incest, the meaning of “goodness”—but does so through a tightly controlled, at times impenetrable narrative. Where opera is exuberant, exaggerated, melodramatic, Bliss is restrained, understated and sardonic. “The first time I read it I thought ‘I can’t do this’!”

Much of the difficulty lies in the fact that Carey’s narrative is structured around short episodes – the reader is led, semi-blind, through Harry Joy’s rude awakening. Death opens his eyes to the decrepitude of his life and the lives of those around him. As the Hell narrative gives sordid meaning to things he'd never thought about before—where was his son’s cash coming from?—so do the connections between these episodes begin to crystallise, and their implications become clear. “That’s the fabulous thing for me because it’s such a challenge,” Holden says chirpily.

“The book gave me the idea of the episodic structure of the opera,” she says, running through the short intrusions that make up the opera. Incredibly, she seems to have pulled this into a coherent, even dramatic, whole. A mammoth chopping-and-changing effort, and the clever use of a revolving stage, mean the action can be punctuated both with some of the book’s funniest scenes—at one point Harry Joy’s car is sat on by an elephant—and some if its darkest depths. “What we did was to take the ideas of the novel and do whatever we wanted with them, really. And I don’t think it would have been nearly as much fun if we’d thought ‘oh golly, we really ought to keep this because it’s here’.”

Just as complicated as the novel is the story of the opera’s somewhat unorthodox production schedule. Though Carey’s novel was published in 1981, Bliss is absolutely a product of the noughties – the whole decade, in fact. Commissioned by Opera Australia in 2000, the opera has taken ten years, and two musical directors—one departed for another job; the other, Richard Hickox, for a better place—to complete.

Incredibly, though, and for reasons which are “off the record”, Holden was not approached until late 2006 to take on the libretto: “I felt a little embarrassed because I went and told everyone I’d got the commission and, actually, I got the commission in August 2007, by which time I’d written half of the thing. It was a bit hairy, actually.”

What followed was a truly international and, it appears, tremendously productive collaboration. What’s surprising is the brevity of pair’s face time: “In that year [2007] in which I wrote most of the libretto, we met twice, very intensively, in hotels and really, well, jammed.”

A ten day boot camp in January 2008 was arrange to flesh out the libretto: “God I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard in my life!” she laughs. “We were just chucking ideas at each other and I’m sure that was when the music began to fill up in his head, along with the ideas he already had from years back.”

Those musical ideas had already started to collect around Dean’s 2004 orchestral suite, Moments of Bliss. Then, in 2008, a commission from Simon Rattle for his return to the Liverpool Philharmonic gave an opportunity for Dean and Holden to road test some musical and dramatic ideas for the central character of Harry Joy, written specifically for baritone Peter Coleman-Wright. Three arias, Songs of Joy, became set pieces in the final opera which premiered, at last, in Sydney in March.

A strange genesis indeed, and one through which the pair appear to have forged a strong bond . Holden is extraordinarily complimentary about Dean: “Brett is the most polymathic musician I think I’ve ever known well. He can run a music college, he can play the viola as well as anybody in the world – you know, he’s just an extraordinary man. The most alarming thing about him is that he’s incredibly nice.”

“When we first met we just jabbered away about music,” she recalls, attempting to explain their instant connection. Indeed, Holden’s upbringing and education was thoroughly musical, rather than literary. And it’s this musical starting point which defines Holden’s approach to opera and, perhaps, underlines her success in grappling with Carey's tricky novel: “There was one radio programme that said I’d made a very good job of converting the novel, but I don’t feel that’s what I’ve done.”

“The needs of a libretto are so totally different to the needs of a novel. A novel needs someone sitting in an armchair reading quietly, and a libretto needs people screaming their heads off and a lot of people listening!”