The Fundació BBVA Fronteres del Coneixement award went this year to a renovator of the operatic language. George Benjamin (London, 1960), composer, conductor and professor at King’s College London, takes home the 400,000 euros of this award for “his extraordinary contribution and impact on contemporary creation in the fields of symphonic music, opera and chamber music”. The minutes of the award, which will be presented in Bilbao in June, highlight the author of Written on skin or Lessons in love and violence who has succeeded in “modernizing the operatic language, proposing new narrative structures and maintaining an emotional dramaturgy that moves the audience of the 21st century”.
Benjamin, “the Mozart of our time”, as Olivier Messiaen defined him, is the most representative name in contemporary music, an author who, at 60 years old, is living a great creative moment and from whom each new opera is awaited with anticipation. Happy and “very honored by the award”, the English composer answers La Vanguardia on the phone from the French campaign. “That this award comes from Spain means a lot, I admire the musical culture of this country and what has happened in the last forty years in terms of classical music.
He belongs to a very visual generation. Are you inspired by images?
Visual stimuli external to music can often help me create structures, atmospheres and moods. I am open to cinema, photography and painting, but in the end it is the music itself that excites me: the rhythm, the lines, the harmony, the form. The rest is secondary.
You were a pop kid who woke up with a passion for the classic Disney Fantasia.
It was a treat to listen to Beethoven, Stravinsky and Mussorgsky. I also discovered Tchaikovsky, Schubert or Bach. That music seemed to me much more wonderful, exciting and profound than anything I had known until then.
He says he wouldn’t have written an opera if he hadn’t met Martin Crimp, librettist with whom he forms a magnificent tandem. How does this magic happen?
do you know I met a lot of people during my first visit to Spain, thanks to a great friend and supporter of mine, Josep Pons, who invited me to the Orquestra del Teatre Lliure. This was in 1990 or 1991. I was looking for a collaborator to do opera and he arranged interviews for me. Among fifteen people was Arthur Miller. He was interested in collaborating and I happened to come across a headline in his newspaper announcing: “George Benjamin will collaborate with Arthur Miller”. But that didn’t happen.
Why not?
He was old and I was only 30 years old. But above all, seen now in perspective, I was not yet ready as a composer.
And it took fifteen years to make the first opera, after meeting Crimp.
It’s a mysterious chemistry: there’s tension, trust, affection. I consider myself lucky because I am a perfectionist and difficult. The essential thing between author and composer is to create tension. And part of the secret with Martin is that we’re not the same. We share details, a fascination for structure and for telling stories. It awakens my imagination, gives me concise structures and interesting characters… and challenges me both aesthetically and structurally. When I get your material, I wonder how the hell I’m going to do it, but I love it.
He now directs Gulbenkian and this summer he premieres his 4th opera, Picture a day like this, in Ais de Provence, a fable that follows a young woman’s quest to prove that happiness exists. In these periods of constant travel, do you somehow find inspiration?
No, I don’t compose during these periods, because composing literally hijacks me for at least two years. I just have the piece in my head, sometimes even in my sleep. It’s a very lonely way to live, but then I work with musicians from all over the world. Now with the Mahler Chamber and also with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. It’s a wonderful contrast: as a component I can take seven weeks to find the solution for a small part, while as a director you make decisions in microseconds.
