One day in the autumn of 2020, a brown envelope dropped on to George Benjamin’s doormat in north-west London. “I thought, ‘Oh boy, it’s got his writing on it. And it’s in there,’” the composer tells me across his kitchen table.
“It” was Martin Crimp’s text for their fourth opera together, Picture a day like this. In other words, a fresh chapter in the story of a remarkable composer-writer partnership. Before Crimp came into his life, Benjamin was known almost as much for his painstaking rate of production as for the shimmering brilliance of his works. Post-Crimp, he’s a composer from whom stage works seem almost to pour. His language “is like an electric current to me”, Benjamin says. “It just gets me writing.”
