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Terrorist opera set to storm the theatre world     

Great operas have often been written about ugly and brutal subjects, ranging from the violent death of a Spanish cigarette factory worker to the demise of a victim of consumption in a Paris garret. Acts of global terrorism, though, have rarely inspired classical composers.
Now that is about to change. The British composer Keith Burstein is writing a new work to be performed in London that is set inside an al-Qaeda suicide cell. The opera, called Manifest Destiny, tells the story of Leila, a young Muslim poet studying in Britain, who is drawn into violent terrorism and then incarcerated in Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Burstein, whose work commemorating the Holocaust was broadcast by the BBC on Holocaust Day, has collaborated on the new opera with playwright Dic Edwards and the early results have already won interest from the acclaimed Broomhill Opera Company, based near Tower Bridge, and from the Cockpit Theatre in north London, where the work will be premiered this autumn.

Although the opera's content is highly controversial - with a cast of characters including the President of the United States and the head of the CIA, as well as the cell of bombers - the composer points out that he is not the only contemporary musician to have been drawn to the powerful subject of Middle Eastern terrorism in recent years.

John Adams's opera The Death of Klinghoffer, to be broadcast on Channel 4 tonight, was first produced at the end of the 1991 Gulf war and tackles the hijacking of the cruise liner Achille Lauro in 1985. Leon Klinghoffer was the name of the wheelchair-bound victim who was selected for execution by the Palestinian hijackers.

'I don't think it is any coincidence that two composers, who are both interested in communicating as widely as possible through music, have turned to this difficult area,' said Burstein. 'I wanted to look at the emotions that drive people to these kind of deadly actions. It is usually because they themselves fear some sort of perceived deadly or threatening action against themselves.'

Burstein, who first came to public attention due to his strong opposition to the rise of atonal contemporary music, believes that tunes and harmonies remain the key to reaching audiences.

Two years ago Burstein was at the centre of a cause célèbre when he won £8,000 in legal damages after an article in the Times accused him of organising a gang of hecklers to 'wreck' concert performances featuring the kind of modern music he disliked.

'My intention in this new opera is to realise the emotional life within the bombers' minds and reveal a view of the world beyond our own Western perspectives,' said Burstein. 'The characters are "emotionalised" and therefore humanised.'

Manifest Destiny began its creative life six months ago when Burstein asked Edwards to write a libretto. The title of the work refers to the nineteenth-century American policy used to justify conquering the lands of the Native American tribes. With gold as the spur then, rather than the contemporary inducement of oil, Burstein and Edwards argue that the same justifications were used to push the ideology of the 'white man' through new boundaries and into new territories.

Edwards stresses that the opera is not intended as propaganda but is an attempt to show the motivation of suicide killers. 'We are trying to make the story human. They are real people after all, who feel pushed into extreme actions,' he said.

The work will first be performed in a concert version with a piano accompaniment. Burstein was also involved in the creation of Stewart Lee and Richard Thomas's National Theatre hit, Jerry Springer: The Opera, developed from a similar, small-scale production, and last summer Lee directed an earlier Burstein work, The Furthering, at The Battersea Arts Centre in south London.

'Burstein's work is musically very arresting,' said David Wybrow, director of the Cockpit Theatre. 'And I am very pleased to be putting on Manifest Destiny for the first time this autumn.'

The heroine of the new opera is Leila, an educated poet who is propelled back into the fundamentalist world after the killing of her father in Palestine. She leaves Daniel, her Jewish partner in London, and returns to the Middle East, where she joins a suicide cell and is finally betrayed.

'I have gradually realised that the story, as so often in opera, turns upon the redemptive power of love,' said Burstein, who studied at the Royal College of Music and set up his own chamber ensemble.

'What more startling circumstance could there be for its discovery than the extremis of Camp X-Ray, where the captured poet turned bomber sees that all that is left is her love for her Jewish partner?'
The Observer  
web site
: www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,963117,00.html
Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent
e-mail:
Monday, May 26, 2003back

 

 

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