Written on Skin

‘An extraordinary opera,’ the New York Times declared. The Guardian spoke of ‘one of the most acclaimed operas of our times’. In the Netherlands the Volkskrant praised its ‘radiant song-lines,

sensitive scoring and the virtuosity of its concentrated text’, while the headline in the Dutch newspaper Trouw was: ‘Finally, an opera for eternity.’ 

With more than eighty performances around the world, Written on Skin (2012), the second opera by the British composer George Benjamin and his established librettist Martin Crimp, was unanimously hailed as a contemporary masterpiece by the international music press. During the Holland Festival 2018 the world-famous Mahler Chamber Orchestra – which premiered this piece under the direction of the composer at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2012 –  will perform a semi-staged revival of this work, based on the original production by the British director Katie Mitchell, staged by British director Benjamin Davis.

For Written on Skin Benjamin and Crimp have drawn on a 13th century legend about the Catalan troubadour Guillem de Cabestaing. A cruel landowner, the Protector, invites an artist to his castle to make a book about him. The work should reflect his merciless exercise of power, but should also witness to the domestic bliss provided by his obedient wife Agnès. But Agnès gradually becomes more and more fascinated by the young artist – the Boy – and eventually seduces him. As a consequence the Protector murders the Boy and serves his heart to his unfaithful wife.

Written on Skin is a dark opera centred on themes of passion, jealousy, oppression and violence. In the grisly denouement of the work, however, there are also undertones of hope and emancipation. When Agnès realizes that she has eaten her lover’s heart, she declares that she has never tasted anything more delicious. This act of resistance from a free-spirited woman against a brutal husband makes the opera absolutely fitting for an era in which the patriarchal exercise of power is critically questioned. 

Benjamin’s music– which has been compared to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Alban Berg’s Wozzeck – moves with virtuosic ease between moments of heightened beauty and unambiguous brutality. Agnès is played by the American soprano Georgia Jarman, who performed the same role to great acclaim in the revival production of Written on Skin at the Royal Opera House, London in early 2017. Her most important counterparts are the Norwegian baritone Audun Iversen as the Protector and the highly successful British countertenor Tim Mead as the Boy.