Medical ethics and the question of whether the pursuit of scientific knowledge should override the express wishes of the individual are central to composer Sarah Angliss’s and librettist Ross Sutherland’s new work, Giant – with John Hunter, surgeon to George III, diametrically opposed to the dying Charles Byrne, terrified of his 7ft 6in body being desecrated in an autopsy. It’s hardly obvious territory for opera, but this 75-minute opener to the year’s Aldeburgh festival held the attention in a compelling, albeit sometimes uneasy way, the music’s eerie metallic edge as transfixing as the moral ambiguities of the 18th-century story. The steep rake of the Britten Studio became a lecture theatre where anatomy students watched grisly dissection processes, with cadavers – before the Anatomy Act of 1832 – all too often provided by bodysnatchers.
Hunter’s insatiable curiosity in investigating the nature of disease and death led him to preserve and exhibit his collection of anatomical specimens, still on view at the Royal College of Surgeons’ Hunterian Museum. His conviction that Byrne’s body would yield vital secrets led to unseemly bartering with the young man, who was genetically destined to die young. But Hunter would ultimately be proved right as DNA testing recently revealed the rare genetic mutation causing the gigantism. Hunter, however, only got Byrne’s corpse by illicitly, unethically intercepting it before its burial at sea.
