Since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first conquered the world’s highest peak 70 years ago, there has been no shortage of mountaineers, amateur and professional, eager to take on the challenge. Many have been successful, but every year too the list of those who have lost their lives on Mount Everest grows longer – 17 have been reported as dead or missing this year alone. But the worst single tragedy occurred in May 1996, when three separate groups were trapped by an unexpected blizzard while they were descending, and eight climbers were killed in a single day.
The events of that day, the fateful coincidences and the mistakes made, have been explored in numerous books, which provided the background to Joby Talbot’s one-act opera. Everest was premiered in Dallas in 2015, and has received further performances across the US, but the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s concert staging, conducted by Nicole Paiement and directed originally by Leonard Foglia, was the first in Britain.
Gene Scheer’s libretto focuses on three members of just one of the stranded groups. Its leader, Rob Hall, has been helping one of his clients, Doug Hansen, to finally reach the summit, leaving another, Beck Weathers, who is suffering from snow blindness, waiting for them lower down. As the weather worsens and the storm envelops them, the two become stranded, and Beck is left to find his own way down the mountain. Scenes of their plight alternate with snapshots of the climbers’ normal lives – there’s Rob’s pregnant wife Jan back home in New Zealand, and Beck’s daughter, Meg, to whom he reveals the depression that drove him to attempt the climb in the first place.
Even if that shuttling between the domestic and the tragic verges on the mawkish at times, it’s a neat enough dramatic shape. But though Talbot’s score is efficient at evoking the threat and grandeur of the mountain in a rather cinematic way, it does little to propel the drama forward, while the matter-of-fact setting of Scheer’s mundane text does not bring any of the characters into sharp focus. There’s no sense of the music doing what an opera score should, adding an extra dramatic dimension; what drama there is stems entirely from the tragic facts of the original story.
What the Barbican performance gained from being staged was debatable – there were video projections of Himalayan snowscapes, blocks strewn in front of the orchestra over which the singers clambered unconvincingly in their climbing gear – though the protagonists, especially Daniel Okulitch as Beck, Andrew Bidlack as Rob, and Craig Verm as Doug, worked hard to bring their characters to life. But the opera never comes close to touching the full depths of the tragedy, or to revealing what drives climbers to risk their lives in the ways that they do.
• Broadcast on Radio 3 on 8 July and available on BBC Sounds for 30 days afterwards.
