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A guide to Judith Weir's music

Lightness, wisdom and imagination. Welcome to the rich musical world of Judith Weir
Tom Service
Monday 28 May 2012 14.27BST

Judith Weir once composed an epic historical opera in three acts, dramatising a cast of
thousands, including the Norwegian army, a piece that told the story of King Harald
Hadradi's failed invasion of England in 1066. It's a work that you'd have thought
requires the armoury of a full-scale opera house to put on, with full-on Cecil B DeMille
extravagance. But in fact, King Harald's Saga is written for solo soprano, who sings all
the parts obviously! and the whole things lasts around 10 minutes. As Weir says, in
writing the piece, "a certain amount of compression has been necessary".
That's typical of Weir's personal and artistic understatement. But King Harald's Saga,
written when she was in her mid-20s in 1979, embodies the qualities that still define
Weir's musical thinking: her concern to tell stories, her ability to distil musical and
dramatic ideas to their essences, and her creation of an idiom that's full of expressive
subtlety but is never anything less than richly communicative.
Her career is framed by King Harald and Miss Fortune, the large-scale opera (ironically,
based on a simple Sardinian folk tale rather than a major historical epic) she recently
wrote for the Bregenz festival and which Covent Garden staged earlier this year. And her
operas are the centrepieces of her musical life. There's the ebullient and exotic playwithin-a-play of A Night at the Chinese Opera, there are dark fairytales, such as the
Ludwig Tieck-inspired Blond Eckbert, the Scottish folk stories and supernatural yarns of
The Vanishing Bridegroom, and an opera she composed for television in 2005, Armida,
about conflict in the Middle East.
All of those pieces manage a trick that Weir's music consistently pulls off, which is to
lead you into a world of enchantment with an apparent simplicity of language. As you'll
hear in virtually every bar of Blond Eckbert, whose ending is an ecstasy of eerie melody,
or the shimmering opening of A Night at the Chinese Opera, Weir has an innate gift for
line for writing tunes, in other words which makes her a distinctively compelling
voice. Hers is addictive, scintillating music. But that very simplicity and immediacy is
just what many critics found cause to complain about in Miss Fortune (below). I
disagree, for what it's worth: what more do you want from a new opera than that it tells a
story clearly, in which the music is consistently imaginative and sometimes, as in the
duet at the start of the opera's second half, genuinely ravishing, and which anybody
coming to the opera house for the first time would remember as a well-made drama and
a luminous, transparent score?
But it's not just her vocal music. Weir has a knack of making the instrumental ensembles
she writes for shine and shimmer in a way that's completely her own. Try the opening of
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her Piano Concerto, for example. It's another pocket-sized compression of a big classical
form into just 15 minutes, scored for piano and string ensemble. Weir somehow
manages to create music that sounds completely new from the utterly familiar elements
of a held chord in the strings and a melody high up in the piano. She is again brilliantly
illuminating writing about her own music: "Ever since the modern piano was born, the
composition of piano concertos has been on an inflationary spiral, and it is now a
musical form associated with the crashingly loud side of music; which is not the kind of
music I generally like to write." Her orchestral piece, The Welcome Arrival of Rain, does
something similar, a transcendence of the base-metals of scales, string melodies and
fanfares into something rich and strange, music that's also inspired by her long-standing
love for Indian music, culture, and storytelling.
A couple of Weir pieces to leave you with? I would recommend Natural History, setting
four Taoist texts from Chuang-tzu for soprano and orchestra. Weir says that she was
attracted to these poems, about a Horse, Singer, Swimmer, and Fish/Bird, because they
"are typical of the qualities I most enjoy amongst this literature; concision, clarity,
lightness and (hidden) wisdom." She is too modest to say it herself, but those are exactly
the qualities that make her music some of the most precious around just now. And the
opening of Moon and Star for chorus and orchestra, a setting of Emily Dickinson she
wrote for the Proms in 1995, is another example of the spine-tingling power of her
music, achieved through lightness, wisdom and sheer imagination.

Five key links

King Harald's Saga
The world's most compressed historical epic Harald's defeat at the hands of the English
with one soprano, in 12 minutes.
A Night at the Chinese Opera
Luminous, brilliant, one of the essential recent(ish) British operas.
Piano Concerto
A quietly shimmering gem of a piece; this double album is a perfect Weir primer.
The Welcome Arrival of Rain
More than musical onomatopoeia, a dazzling orchestral evocation.
Blond Eckbert
Ludwig Tieck's dark, incestuous folk-tale brought to eerie, economical, melodic life.

Next week: Oliver Knussen.

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Judith Weir

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