Manon Gropius is best remembered as the “angel” to whose memory Alban Berg dedicated his great Violin Concerto. Her parents were Alma Mahler and the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, and she died of polio in 1935 at the age of 18. Manon and her mother did not get on – Alma even stayed away from her funeral in Vienna – though the year before her death they had spent Easter together in Venice. There they stayed in a hotel called Oltre il Giardino (Beyond the Garden) and that provided the title for Stephen McNeff’s chamber opera based on their deeply ambivalent relationship. First performed in Slovenia two years ago, it received its UK premiere at the Lichfield festival.
McNeff and his librettist Aoife Mannix avoided the temptation of creating a biographical opera about Alma and her daughter. In their text she becomes Ottilia, a woman living out old age with her crumbling memories in New York, and Manon is Klara, a young journalist who interviews her. But as the 70-minute two-hander goes on, Ottilia’s attitude to Klara seems to echo Alma’s treatment of her daughter: “How will you catch a man dressed like a fish?” she asks her at one point, while Klara responds by accusing her of impaling men “like worms on a hook”. While recalling fragments of her life Ottilia/Alma unloads her guilt about her treatment of Manon, as well as her resentment at being forced to give up writing music while she was married to Gustav Mahler, but whether through age or design she reconstructs her past too, so that fact and fantasy constantly blur.
It’s certainly a potent subject for music theatre; there are no “operatic” set pieces, just a sharply characterised musical dialogue that McNeff’s sparing accompaniment for a quartet of violin, clarinet, harp and piano (members of Gemini, conducted from the keyboard by Dominic Wheeler), counterpoints very economically. There’s no staging apart from a few props, and dramatically it all relies on the ability of the two singers to bring their characters to life. Alison Rose vividly tracks Klara’s transition from confident inquisitor to intimate confidante as the piece goes on, while Susan Bickley magnificently presents Ottilia as very much the grande dame, with just enough vulnerability to add another dimension to a character whom history has never regarded well.
• At All Saints Church, Hereford, on 25 July.
