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PROGRAMME NOTE

In this Symphonic Diptych I have compressed my opera Anna into two movements, one for each act, which attempt to tell the story in purely orchestral terms: all the vocal parts included have been transferred to instruments. In doing so I have slightly increased the opera’s orchestra, using four horns instead of two, adding two trombones, and replacing the piano part with harp. The movements may be played together or separately.

     The opera is about a brother (Peter) and sister (Anna) and their different reactions to the revolution that has just taken place in their country – obviously based on the 1989 revolutions in central Europe. Roger Scruton’s libretto is both a story of love culminating in death, and of forgiveness. Peter and Anna have lost both their parents: their father was arrested for helping dissidents to escape and died in prison. Anna falls in love with a young man, Miro, who went to live in America but has come back to his home town. At Peter’s insistence Anna asks Miro to explain how he was able to escape. He eventually confesses that he was forced as a teenager by the secret police to work with them. They both then realise that it was Miro’s information about Anna’s father that led to his arrest and subsequent death. Anna, after the initial terrible shock, finds it in herself to forgive Miro. Peter cannot; he discovers his father’s gun and confronts Miro, but then turns the gun on himself. Anna tries to get it away from him; when it goes off in the struggle she is killed. The tragedy of her death unites the two men, and the chorus join them in a prayer for forgiveness.

    The beginning of the first movement ‘Anna in Love’ is dominated by Peter’s gloomy feelings about the revolution and how it will probably not bring about the things that he and his father aspired to. His mood is interrupted by Anna and her friend Marta who are more optimistic, and they dance a tango. Anna is grateful to her brother for bringing her up after their parents died, and she sings a tender aria about her childhood (oboe, then clarinet) together with a violin theme that conveys her innocence.

     Into the bookshop where she works comes Miro (solo trumpet). He immediately sees Anna and is struck by her, as she is by him. They introduce themselves and there is an immediate rapport, and when they sing a simple duet (flute and cor anglais) we know they are bound to fall in love. That their love is eventually doomed is not at all obvious from the final section of the movement, which, using a new theme that now depicts Anna as a mature woman, is a love duet ending in ecstatic consummation.

     The opening of the second movement (‘Lament for Anna’) immediately anticipates the tragedy that will eventually occur, with the mature Anna’s theme presented in a solemn G minor. We move on to Anna’s aria (solo oboe) which expresses the tumult of her feelings, but ends in her forgiveness of Miro. Finally, Anna’s death; Peter’s and Miro’s acts of forgiveness (solo cello and viola); followed by the whole ensemble who in the opera take up the lines “She paid the price of our bitterness. For love of her, We must forgive.” The ending is a quiet D major.