The biggest challenge presented by Violet, Tom Coult’s first opera, whose premiere opened this year’s Aldeburgh festival, is getting to grips with the basic premise of its plot. Playwright Alice Birch’s libretto tells the story of a woman who lives in the biggest house in an insular village with Felix, her controlling husband, and Laura, an over-attentive maid, and is compelled to follow a daily routine of strictly domestic duties. “For as long as I have lived,” Violet says at one point, “I have never held anything like hope or aspiration or joy for the potential of what my life could be.”
There’s no hint of where the village is and when the action takes place, and no explanation either of why time there begins to collapse, losing one hour in each day, until eventually at the end of the opera there is nothing left at all. As a clockmaker marks off the steadily shortening days, village society steadily disintegrates – livestock is destroyed, children are sacrificed – but Violet welcomes the freedom the chaos offers; she builds a boat, and takes it to the shore to find out what the rest of the world is like.
